Scripting News

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 01:46:22 GMT

NBC has the first network news show to go HD.

Too much hype

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 02:07:01 GMT

Note at 6PM Pacific: Yahoo Pipes missed its own opening day.

Back to the drawing boards for one of the most over-hyped non-events in the history of the Internet.

Pipes investigation

I see that Yahoo has a new web app, called Pipes, that looks to me like a feed construction kit.

It takes RSS inputs, processes them in ways that are specified by the user, and produces feeds as its output.

How useful is this? Not sure. In all the years that I've used RSS apps, I've never wanted this functionality. But then I never wanted Feedburner either, and that's proven very popular.

One of the first things I want to know is what is the quality of the RSS output they produce? Did they, like Apple did with iTunes, add a lot of proprietary stuff to their RSS? Ive been looking for some output on the web, but so far haven't found any. I'm optimistic because Yahoo has been an outstanding RSS comunity member.

Note: the server is back up, although slow, at 8:20AM Pacific. The RSS they generate looks fine.

At 10:40AM it's down again.

From a quick persual of the functionality last night and the fact that the server isn't responding right now (5:45AM Pacific), it seems this app uses lots of CPU on the server.

I agree with Nik and Richard that this is an application platform, and that Pipes users are likely to be fairly technical scripting-level users.

Clearly it should take OPML as input, that's the usual way of exchanging lists of feeds.

I'm interested in knowing what other Scripting News readers have learned from experimenting with Pipes.

Speaking at Public Media

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 16:48:30 GMT

Good news, I'm speaking at the Public Media conf on Feb 23 in Boston, as outlined here and here, I guess it was compelling. Thanks to Doc Searls for his help.

It also looks like I may lead a discussion at Microsoft's Mix 07 conference this year, after not getting an invite in 2006. This time I knew there was a problem in advance, and apparently asked the right question of the right people, privately.

My proposed topic is "Let's design the perfect podcast player." No one makes it now, not Apple, not Microsoft, but a lot of people who listen to podcasts have an idea of what they want. It makes for a good, spirited, productive discussion.

BTW, the conference ends on my 52nd birthday, which is a once in a lifetime thing because my birthday is the 2nd day of the 5th month. Yeah I was a math major. And because I'm a programmer I'm superstitious. ";->"