Scripting News

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 23:15:11 GMT

Today I rented an apartment in downtown Seattle, near Pike Place market, museums, restaurants, ferries. It's a short-term lease, puts me in Seattle at least through the end of November. It's the first time I've lived in the center of a city. I move in on Wednesday. Exciting!!

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 23:41:06 GMT

Movie of the entrance to the Seattle Art Museum.

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 23:52:55 GMT

Ben Adida: When is a lie really a lie?

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 23:11:12 GMT

BBC: "70 people die in widespread fighting across Iraq between militants and US-led forces."

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 18:24:12 GMT

Grand Forks Herald: "Bloggers now are responding to events not as opinion writers but as fact-checkers and skilled reporters."

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 16:19:29 GMT

Copenhagen is having a blogger's dinner honoring Dan Gillmor.

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 16:30:12 GMT

Two years ago: "Why be Semantic when you can be Romantic?"

Scoble kicks RSS ass?

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 08:50:40 GMT

Yesterday I wrote about how Seattle is kicking my ass, now it's time to debunk Scoble's gross condemnation of RSS.

On Wednesay he posted that MSDN was limiting its RSS feed, dropping full text, because they were serving terabytes through RSS, and weren't happy with the economics.

Either Scoble didn't explain or I wasn't paying attention, because they were doing something very strange: aggregating all their blogs into one feed. They have thousands of blogs. In any hour the chances that one or more blogs changed is near 100 percent. And the feed is huge, every time you load it, you're downloading a lot of blog posts you don't care about.

The solution is simple, and it follows the grain of the Web, follows the intent of micro-publishing, and it's the way every other blogging community works -- simply offer a feed for every blog. That takes care of everything. It's just wrong to turn a community of weblogs into one giant Usenet group or Yahoo mail list.

So why does Scoble blame RSS? He's got the journalist's impulse for sensationalism and he can't say Microsoft is broken or they'd fire him. ";->"

Microsoft's Tommy Williams responds

Sun, 12 Sep 2004 18:30:53 GMT

Via email...

"blogs.msdn.com does offer individual feeds for each blog and they continue to be full text. But, for some reason, a lot of people subscribe to the main feed and that's what was killing the team paying for the bandwidth.

"So the entries in the main aggregated feed were cut short, but the individual feeds remain full text.

"I personally never understood why anyone would want to subscribe to the aggregated feed. There's way too much stuff there for me to look at. I would rather subscribe to individual bloggers.

"But it seems there are a lot of people who disagree with me, hence the gigantic bandwidth bill."