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October 20, 2003
Jay Rosen follow-up: What is conservative about blog-journalism?
This is a followup to the post about what is radical about...
As an entrant in the marketplace of ideas, the weblog obeys—and does not repeal—the ancient laws of supply and demand. The “news” from some sites will be in demand more than the stuff from others. Just as most new businesses fail, most new weblogs fail. That’s the marketplace.
PressThink: What's Conservative About the Weblog Form in Journalism?
October 16, 2003
What´s radical about blog-journalism? Some answers and a discussion...
Jay Rosen has put up ten items pointing to what is radical about the weblog form of journalism.
Here is, in my opinion, one of the most interesting points:
The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most (not all) of today’s journalism comes out of the market economy.
Different history, different culture, different driving powers and inspirations, different goals.
In the comment section of the post, people continue the discussion.
PressThink: What's Radical About the Weblog Form in Journalism?
October 14, 2003
Set your aggregators on stun!
Someone, I can't remember who at the moment, wrote in his blog about how RSS would be even better if it was easier to find interesting feeds. Here is some development on that area.
Dave Winer proposes a format and process designed to allow news aggregators to autodetect public RSS-feeds and display them to the user:
A few weeks back, a question was raised by Jeremy Zawodny on behalf of Yahoo. They have a large number of RSS feeds that they want to make available to aggregators. They need a machine-readable format and a default location for the file. Further, this file should be able to contain links to other files in this format so that directories can be distributed. A format and location is proposed in this document.
I must say that Bloglines does a great job of detecting feeds, and present them in an interface where the user easily can select one or more for subscription. This of course requires that the feeds are linked from the page fed to Bloglines.
This would further enhance the usability of RSS, allowing for machine based collection of all feeds announced in a much easier, more predictable way than what we see today.
October 12, 2003
Point and click payments
Now we're talking. Pay using your cellphone, not by receiving or sending SMS, but by clicking a few keys and pointing it to a receiver.
The whole idea of convergenge is certainly moving on. But it it not TV sets and computers that merge, it is cell phones and just about everything else we want to do while moving around. Now the time has come to merge debit cards with cell phones.
So why not make the phone a full-fledged wallet? "We are conditioned to think that a credit card is a plastic rectangle," said Cho Eun-sang, a senior manager at Harex Infotech, among the first companies to develop the technology. "But it is actually the data on the strip at the back, and data can be stored anywhere." Instead of handing over credit or debit cards that get swiped, users type their passcode on the phone keypad, point the device at a special receiver on a checkout counter and press a key. It's as simple as operating a TV remote. The phone shoots the card data in an infrared beam or radio waves. No signature is necessary. For small payments at vending machines, the passcode isn't even required. Transmissions are encrypted and secure, and subscribers who lose their phones can get them disabled within seconds by informing the credit-card company.
This is great. I would certainly love a handheld device that managed all my communication, all my scheduling, all my connectivity and all my payments. For starters.
October 11, 2003
Character sets, leeches and weird IE behavior...
Joel Spolsky has written an excellent piece describing the history of why there are different character sets in the world and why he true way spells Unicode.
Not only is it a great summary and introduction to the importance of using Unicode in internationalized software (which software isn't in this age of networking...), Joel also explains the weird behavior that IE shows when encountering pages with undefined character sets:
What do web browsers do if they don't find any Content-Type, either in the http headers or the meta tag? Internet Explorer actually does something quite interesting: it tries to guess, based on the frequency in which various bytes appear in typical text in typical encodings of various languages, what language and encoding was used. Because the various old 8 byte code pages tended to put their national letters in different ranges between 128 and 255, and because every human language has a different characteristic histogram of letter usage, this actually has a chance of working. It's truly weird, but it does seem to work often enough that naïve web-page writers who never knew they needed a Content-Type header look at their page in a web browser and it looks ok, until one day, they write something that doesn't exactly conform to the letter-frequency-distribution of their native language, and Internet Explorer decides it's Korean and displays it thusly, proving, I think, the point that Larry Wall's quote about "be strict in what you emit and liberal in what you accept" is quite frankly not a good engineering principle.
Here is another valuable nugget of knowledge: always put your content-type declaration first in he head of your HTML-page. Why? To make a classic "hen and egg problem" easier to handle for the browser:
It would be convenient if you could put the Content-Type of the HTML file right in the HTML file itself, using some kind of special tag. Of course this drove purists crazy... how can you read the HTML file until you know what encoding it's in?! Luckily, almost every encoding in common use does the same thing with characters between 32 and 127, so you can always get this far on the HTML page without starting to use funny letters:
<html> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
But that meta tag really has to be the very first thing in the <head> section because as soon as the web browser sees this tag it's going to stop parsing the page and start over after reinterpreting the whole page using the encoding you specified.
Great reading on a Friday night with a heavy cold. ;)
October 10, 2003
RSS rocks. Now tailored to your interests...
To a news and information junkie like me, RSS is the best thing since the much talked about sliced bread. Imagine if you could get tailored RSS feeds for special phrases or subjects... Well, go right ahead, using Yahoo!
Using the RSS feeds of Yahoo! you can get tailored feeds for any word or combination of words you like. Follow all news about your favorite artist, upcoming movies or particular companies... Excellent.
Following the link below you can read more, and also find a simple tool to create your own Yahoo! feeds.
October 07, 2003
Calling the telemarketers at home
This guy has published the phone number of the ATA, American Teleservices Association, in an article about how ATA want to stop a new Do Not Call registry (which does exactly what the name hints). Hilarious.
Is it annoying to receive a call in your home by a totally unknown person wanting to peddle uninteresting products? Yes. Is the ATA, who represents companies making calls annoyed by totally unknown people calling them wanting to discuss not being called in their homes? Indeed.
It turned out that a lot of you were eager to call up the telemarketing industry. Thousands and thousands of you called the ATA. I found out about this when I saw an article in a direct-marketing newspaper, the DM News, which quoted the executive director of the ATA, Tim Searcy. Here's an excerpt from the article: ''The ATA received no warning about the article from Barry or anyone connected with him,'' Searcy said. ``. . . the Barry column has had harmful consequences for the ATA. An ATA staffer has spent about five hours a day for the past six days monitoring the voice mail and clearing out messages.'' That's correct: The ATA received NO WARNING that it was going to get unwanted calls! Not only that, but these unwanted calls were an INCONVENIENCE for the ATA, and WASTED THE ATA'S TIME!
Hilarious.
October 05, 2003
Weblog history, present and future
These two articles give a good overview on weblog history, the current state and where it might go.
Clearly the blogging phenomenon means something. We still have to figure out what though. It will never replace mainstream media, but with 3 million blogs out there we have a movement going that is similar to what aspiring rock musicians have been doing for ages: creating stuff, handing out demos and looking for attention.
Which is not to say that 90 percent of news-related blogs aren't crap. First of all, 90 percent of any new form of expression tends to be mediocre (think of band demos, or the cringe-inducing underground papers of years gone by), and judging a medium by its worst practitioners is not very sporting. Still, almost every criticism about blogs is valid - they often are filled with cheap shots, bad spelling, the worst kind of confirmation bias, and an extremely off-putting sense of self-worth (one that this article will do nothing to alleviate). But the "blogosphere," as many like to pompously call it, is too large and too varied to be defined as a single thing, and the action at the top 10 percent is among the most exciting new trends the profession has seen in a while. Are bloggers journalists? Will they soon replace newspapers? The best answer to those two questions is: those are two really dumb questions; enough hot air has been expended in their name already. A more productive, tangible line of inquiry is: Is journalism being produced by blogs, is it interesting, and how should journalists react to it? The answers, by my lights, are "yes," "yes," and "in many ways." After a slow start, news organizations are beginning to embrace the form.
Hopefully it will change journalism to something more interesting, with a more exciting voice and whole lot more credibility.
Source code reading tips
Joel on Software a few years back published some interesting tips on how to easier decipher software code. Still interesting.
Interesting response:
Another co-worker asked me how it (reading source code of a messy project) was going, and I told him, "It's just like reading Talmud."
What is the point of blogging?
BloggerCon conference at Harvard is in full wing. Someone asked what to respond when asked about the point of blogging. Philip Greenspun has scribbled down a few suggestions.
Like Philip says, this is like the question back in the 90´s: What is the point of a personal web site?
Personal Web sites are interesting because they support 20- or 30-page essays beautifully, with search engines directing interested readers to those essays right at the moment that they're curious about that topic.
Philip quotes a few suggestions from people at BloggerCon. I personally like Philip´s answer best:
My personal answer: my main site (philip.greenspun.com) is there to relate things that I've learned so that others don't have to repeat my mistakes; this blog is here to entertain friends and if other folks stumble across it and are entertained or find their thinking sparked in new directions, that's gravy.
Simple and easy. It is about sharing and finding.
Software code should be habitable
A very interesting view on code and the aspect of further developmnt and maintenance. Code should be habitable. And hospitable.
Making sure the code you or your team produces is "habitable"; meaning among other things easy to understand, extend, correct and replace; increases the lifespan of the code and also enhances the feeling of responsibility for the code among the team members.
The author, Richard Gabriel, paints pictures and makes examples using architecture and buildings as a metaphor.
I’ve heard Gregor Kiczales—one of the CLOS designers—say that he wishes that computer science practice could reach the level of engineering excellence that creates buildings like the Superdome in New Orleans. He points out that the design of the Superdome puts toghether pieces made from a variety of materials and from a range of engineering and building disciplines. The result is a monument to that engineering skill. This is a tempting picture, but I think it’s off base. Buildings like the Superdome lack habitability. In this instance people inhabit the building, but only for very short periods of time, and for very special occasions—and such buildings are not easily grown or altered. The Superdome is a static building, and therefore it can stand as a monument, being little else.
Very interesting, and to me a view on coding adapted to reality at least when it comes to smalland medium sized projects.
October 04, 2003
The death of email...
Email is getting more and more useless by the minute. I hardly think anyone with a high degree of connectedness would argue this. So what comes next? Ray Ozzie says some interesting things.
According to Ray Ozzie, we will for our proffessional work move over to tighter, more controlled workspaces where the people we do critical business with will join us to do efficient online work.
Email will not be a helper in the future, it will be handled as a necessary tool (evil?) for open communication. You will not do any important communication using that tool.
Right now, every major enterprise has a "content-scanning gateway" that processes every incoming email, looking for Dangerous Stuff. Many individuals do the same thing on their own computers. Some enterprises are beginning to quarantine incoming email for extended periods - sometimes an hour or more. Maybe you'll get too much junk, or maybe you won't get what you're supposed to get. Maybe you'll get it, but it'll be too late. It depends upon where they turn the knob on the software ... and it's insane.
I think he is right. Going through my now easier browsed information feeds (thanks to Bloglines) this morning I saw that Joi Ito also has written on the subject. He talks about p-time and m-time in relation to keeping on touch with the context in which interesting things and people develop and communicate.
He is saying the same thing as Ray Ozzie: email is being down prioritized to a background activity. IRC, IM and blog posts are more important than the uncontrolled email environment.
October 01, 2003
MailBucket - email2RSS gateway
MailBucket suggests an alternative way of reading your email, suitable mainly for keeping track of high volume mailing lists.
Simple and interesting: create a mail-address, forward all email to that address and then read it converted to an RSS-feed in your favorite news aggregator. Great concept.
How do you archive an RSS-feed though?
