Thursday, April 01, 2004

On this day seven years ago a weblog called Scripting News first appeared. 

The problem with Google being so creative about syndication is that it makes some people think I automatically go negative on them. If you had asked me a year or so ago what was the chance that Google would put me in this position, I'd say nil. Anyway for the record, I call it as I see it, and I see their new mail thing as independent from the mess they're making in syndication. 

Okay okay, you got me on this one Russ. Phew. It is April 1. Oy. 

I was going to do an April Fool joke myself but decided not to waste the time. It was going to go like this. I was going to kill my RSS feed and invent a new format called Mota. The top level item would be called deef. Under that would be knil, eltit, enilgat, di, deifidom, etc. For one day I would only support this format, but I was going to say it was forever. People would be shocked. They'd think I had lost my mind. Then they'd realize it was a joke and they'd laugh. The next day I'd go back to RSS, and deprecate Mota once and for all. Goodbye Mota. It's been fun. Then a couple of days later when it was time to write the code I said kcuf ti. I had my laugh. That's all I needed.  

Kinja, a new centralized RSS aggregator, is open for business. NY Times article. Nick Denton explains. 

I heard about Google mail on Paul Harvey's radio broadcast, then it got a mention on the CBS radio hourly news. A fee gigabyte and integration with the search engine. That's cool. Raises the bar for Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, etc. 

Something really is amiss with my content management system. Sorry for the missing posts for the last days of March. I went back through my aggregator and rescued them, here they are below. Not sure what went wrong, but at least the ideas are preserved. (Got to the bottom of the problem, it wasn't an April Fool's joke. Should be fixed now.) 

Rescued posts from the last few days 

Andrew Grumet invites discussion about the Infrastructure session.

The discussion about journalism for BloggerCon continues strong over at Jay Rosen's weblog.

At lunch yesterday Rogers Cadenhead said that the Guardian has an ombudsman, and that he directed the issue about the lack of disclosure in Hammersley's piece, and had not received a response. Why does the Guardian (or any other paper for that matter) employ an arbiter and then not respond when an ethical issue is raised? I've sent emails and talked on the phone with various people about this. They can't seem to hear that the issue isn't that I got some bad press, that happens all the time. What matters is that a major newspaper, whose integrity appears to matter to them, has let one side in a dispute report the news, without labeling it as opinion. Secondary, there are major factual errors in the piece all of which favor Hammerley's position. And third, yes it does make me angry that they make me look like someone that I'm not. But don't miss the first and second issues. You may know that it was an opinion piece, but readers of the Guardian were not told. Now the core question -- does this happen regularly at the Guardian? Seems to me they'd want to protect their reputation by troubling themselves to answer the questions.

Jon Udell: "Something wonderful died with Napster: the collaborative discovery and sharing of a wide diversity of music."

See the picture over there in the right column? --> Well, I'm a lot more tanned than that now. Kind of overdid it in the last couple of days. North Florida has the best beaches anywhere. Lots of room, great swimming, Listening to Richard Clarke's book. Audio books are perfect for the beach. No fussing with pages, or getting tanning oil all over the place. You can close your eyes and soak it up. Saw Ed Cone's comment on Glenn Reynolds' dismissal of the Clarke story. Yeah, the right-wingers are missing the point. Sure I think Clarke is a sanctimonious self-important Republican. But what he says is worth listening to, considering, and doing something about. Let the President know that we want to be ready for the next great act of terrorism. Seriously. There won't be any mercy for the next President who didn't prepare us for it.

More Russian RSS. The hits keep comin!

Not sure what happened to yesterday's posts. Luckily the RSS archive is intact, so I'll be able to restore it when I get back home.