Saturday, March 27, 2004

Here's a sign of hope. The Open Directory Project is going to do something with RSS, not sure what, but it's a good sign, if only just a start. Here's what I would like them to do. 1. Associate a feed with a level of the hierarchy, so someone can subscribe to a category, and anything that appeared in that category would show up in the reader's aggregator as new. 1a. Associate a feed with a level in the other direction, so that news can be routed to a category in the directory. So, to the left, you'd see the stuff that doesn't change often, and in a box to the right is the new stuff. 2. Let an author maintain a whole level of the directory with RSS. 3. What about more than one level? We thought of that too, it's called OPML. 4. After adopting RSS and OPML, implement inclusion, meaning you can point to an OPML file anywhere a node can appear and the content of that OPML is included in the directory as if it were part of the directory. 5. From there, the whole thing will be unbundled, let the search engines understand an OPML file and display the as Yahoo-like directories. 

Another thing on my to-do list, write a how-to for aggregator developers on password-protected feeds. It came up in an interview I did with an InfoWorld reporter. I told him how Radio does it, he asked if other aggregators handle username-passwords in RSS feed URLs, and I said I don't know. What we did with Radio is use the standard way of including a username-password in a URL, and then looked for places where subscriptions are exported, and turned off exporting of those URLs. That's about all there is to it if your HTTP engine understand usernames and passwords.  

More RSS stuff from Russia.  

Aggreg8 is an "easy way of keep track of all your favourite websites without visiting each of them individually." 

I had huge trouble dealing with Travelocity on my mid-March California trip, and unfortunately the trouble is not over yet. Got my credit card bill, and they double-billed me for the hotel. An extra $521.49 for them, from me. Called them up, waited on hold a half-hour (as usual) and they didn't have a record of the trip. A supervisor will email me on Tues with the status of the refund. This does not inspire confidence. The man on the phone insisted that he was helping me. In what way? I wanted to know. They took money from me, and I'm trying to get them to give it back. Helping me would be accidentally giving me money. Fat chance of that!  

AKMA had a great idea, a bunch of bloggers each record one chapter of Lessig's new book and put it together into an audio book. It's a rainy day here in Boston, so I did chapter eleven, entitled Chimera.  

I found a very nice sound recording program, it works quite well. 

It's not exactly RSS that breaks through Chinese censorship, it's centralized aggregators that act as a proxy. Clever.  

Dowbrigade, a good human being, has a crisis that involves cats. I'd offer a home for them if I wasn't traveling so much in the next two months.  

Last night NPR's On Point focused on Google.  

Microsoft Research is having an invitation-only conference on social computing next week. Read about it at Scoble's. List of participants. Kevin Schofield explains why it's exclusive. 

A key part of I-95 connecting NYC and Boston is going to be out for a few weeks. Week after next I'm going to NY for a couple of days, I was going to drive, but now I'm not sure. It's always high-traffic, but I take I-84, and except around Hartford, it keeps moving. But with I-95 down, my guess is it'll be bumper-to-bumper both ways all the way on 84.  

Five years ago today: "If you've got a losing strategy, the best tactic is to admit defeat asap and get on with it."