BBC is a river too 

The NY Times is such a hit on iPhones.

Naturally, the BBC, with an incredible array of news feeds, is next up for revival.

http://bbcriver.com/

Great on all mobile devices...

Enjoy!

Scoble & Rubel 

Scoble has TwitterGram, as an art, down to a science.

Rubel gets the big vision. If Apple had created an open platform, I'd be hard at work on it now. If anyone would port Frontier (it's GPL) to their mobile device, the whole thing would run right now. I'd help of course. (Important: I could also grant a non-GPL license to any platform vendor, to the original code release only.)

Nokia? Microsoft? Sony? Apple?

RSS & OPML for TwitterGrams 

Every registered user now has his or her own RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures. Since that's the standard for podcast feeds, you're all podcasters now. Yehi.

For example, here's my feed. Scoble. Mike Arrington. Nomadicoder.

As with any group of feeds, there must be an OPML file that joins them all.

Applications? RSS and podcasting have had pretty good uptake around the Internet.

PS: There's been a feed for all TG's since the beginning.

PPS: Mike Hamilton may have found the compelling reason for Yahoo Pipes to support the Twitter API (and enclosures for RSS 2.0 feeds).

PPPS: On June 26 there were 406 references for TwitterGram on Google. Today there are 407,000.

PPPPS: I did my own LOL Cats.

Cold-brew coffee 

Last week I read an article in the NY Times about cold-brew coffee and decided to try it.

I'm drinking a cup now.

How it works. You buy a special plastic brewing container, it holds about a half gallon of water and one pound of coffee. There's a hole at the bottom of the container, which takes a plug, and has a place to lay a filter which is about 1/2 inch thick, made of some kind of fiber. You let the whole thing stand for 3 or 12 hours (depending on whose instructions you're following) and then pull the plug and put the plastic container on top of a carafe designed to fit under it. Let it drip for about 1/2 hour and then put the carafe in the fridge. The next morning it's cold and ready to make into iced coffee, or to be diluted (it creates a concentrated coffee) and zapped in a microwave.

It's supposed to create radically better coffee.

As I said, I'm drinking a cup now, and it doesn't taste any different from hot-brewed coffee. I'll try some iced coffee later, but I'm not expecting radically greater coffee.

BTW, the Times article reads like a blog post.

Just thought I'd mention that.

How to learn new stuff 

A story worth mentioning.

I was watching a blogtv show with Jeff Pulver talking about the iPhone. He didn't have one. Not that he can't afford it, he can, but he objected to the myriad of ways the iPhone is closed to anyone's innovation but Apple's, or anyone's economics but AT&T's. I share his disgust. Sometimes it seems as if American corporations are in the business of deceiving customers into thinking they're getting more power and utility, and then snatching it back and leaving us with less (and them with our money). Even though I adore the product, Apple is really pushing the limits on this with the iPhone.

But I digress.

I posted a comment on Twitter that caught a fair amount of attention, and surprisingly, caught Pulver's attention too, and shortly after that I read on his blog that he had bought an iPhone!

Now that surprised me. People aren't supposed to listen to what I say. That's not part of my movie, whose plot is that I spread the truth and no one hears me.

What's next? An open SDK from Apple?

Reminds me of another story.

In the mid-90s I was considered by some at Apple to be their #1 enemy, more so than Microsoft which was eating their GUI lunch, or the web that was undermining their assumptions about how dumb users are. I think it was because I didn't know how to present my opinions so they'd go down easy (I'm better at it now) and because they weren't listening very well (they had bigger problems to solve). Then they fired the CEO and brought in Gil Amelio, a kindly older gent, who really prided himself on listening. I was invited in to meet him, and of course we hit it off (all I wanted was to be listened to). A month or so later I was invited to be part of an Amelio keynote (a poor imitation of a Jobs keynote) and it went off smoothly, and created quite a bit of buzz in the then-nascent blogosphere.

Someone who worked at Apple at the time wondered if hell had frozen over too.

Funny how people can do things you don't expect them to.

The point? Congrats to Pulver. We ought to get together in a few weeks to compare notes on the iPhone.

Also after a little more than a week I have some concrete conclusions, which I outline briefly in this TwitterGram, but which I will expand on for sure either in a blog post or a podcast.