Scripting News

Reuters: "Grass-roots publishing tools are putting the power of authorship in the hands of millions."

Thu, 14 Nov 2002 18:39:46 GMT

Bret Fausett, who runs the ICANN weblog, is an enthusiastic supporter of the dot-blog top-level domain. He observes \"a majority of those participating in the Scripting News poll seemed to share that sentiment. What a poll can't do though is explain why people think it's a good or bad idea.\" I asked Bret to gather reasons pro and con, so if you have a strong opinion either way, please let him know. Thanks.

Thu, 14 Nov 2002 18:20:48 GMT

I'm doing an interesting project to backup a Radio installation into the cloud. Eventually this will allow people to synchronize work between office and home, a common feature request. In the process, I found a new use for RSS, as an interchange format for weblog software. Almost everything we store about a weblog post is now suppored by RSS, and for those bits that aren't, we can define a namespace. I feel this in some way ratifies the work we did with RSS 2.0. If it can handle all that a reasonably mature blogging tool can throw at it, it's getting pretty mature itself.

Thu, 14 Nov 2002 18:28:35 GMT

I've been mostly staying out of the brewing storm over the inadequacies of RDF, having staked out a clear preference in Y2K, when offered the opportunity to convert all my software to RDF, to please a few random people, I declined to do so, and have never regretted the decision. If you're sitting on the fence and thinking about committing your entire existence to RDF, please, read Tim Bray's narrative as told by Joe Gregorio. Some great soundbites. "Ahh... the RDF tax strikes again. I want to do something that is obvious and straightforward and implicit in the resource/representation relationship, and using RDF is going to cost me oceans of arcane totally human-opaque syntax."

Thu, 14 Nov 2002 17:56:57 GMT

William Safire: You are a suspect.

Thu, 14 Nov 2002 18:07:57 GMT

Here's the Markoff article Safire referenced. "The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe -- including the United States."