Eat your Cooking with Amy via RSS and Atom.

Feature request: let newsreaders understand Amy's recipes, restaurant reviews, packaged products, and events.

1. Fresh stuff is prominent. Unlike other sites, readers always know where to look for updates and top of mind. Contrast with your typical corporate site of a thousand pages and no trusted way to know what is new. The old rule that fresh content attracts return visitors remains true.
2. Writing precedes organization. In wikis and most web sites, you first decide where in the site you are going to add or revise content. Blogging says "write first, worry about filing later." This has the benefit of shortening the distance between thought and captured utterance. It also frees the blogger from squeezing an idea into an existing box.
3. Write once, Save to everywhere. Not only is the distance from thought to paper shortened, blogging (and other [CMS] tools) also lets you route your post. Depending on the tool, you can distribute your post to multiple blogs, to email distribution lists, to [RSS] subscribers. You can also make the post visible to readers navigating by broad categories, by finely keyworded topics, and by criteria inferred from the post's content. So routing can be an afterthought. And bloggers know that their first impulse should be to open the blank page and write.

p.s. I originally posted this on Saturday, 3 January, but I somehow lost it (operator error). I noticed it was gone when Michael Boyink mentioned it (well considered comments, Michael). I recovered it from a copy kept by eVectors' k-collector (gracie).

[a klog apart]

I really want a standalone autodetection tool. As I surf, it will:

• live in the Windows system tray
• parse pages for urls pointing to syndication formats like RSS and Atom
• verify those feeds exist and collect their metadata
• write a log file of the detection and verification info, in OPML
• display the number of new discoveries when hovering over the system tray icon
• push the file to a server, periodically and optionally.

By being a separate application from the RSS newsreader, the autodetective will be:

• Smaller, consuming fewer system resources than a newsreader
• Focused on the craft of detection, becoming smarter about finding things on the pages I read
• Independent of a newsreader, so I can have more than one newsreader (including browser-based ones) without having every page I read parsed for each tool.
• Diverse, detecting tidbits in my emails, chats, IRC sessions, etc.

If we wanted to get fatter about the client, it could spider to discover deeper (crawl this site) or discover wider (crawl the blogrolls you see). Less relevance than pages you've actually seen, but more context - especially as you revisit favorite blogs and services.

I'd also like the detective to discover more kinds of things and make sense of them:

• Contact information (emails, phone numbers, postal addresses)
• Physical locations (postal addresses, city names, geocoding)
• Calendar events (dates, times, durations, descriptions)
• Rich media (sound, video, flash files)  

so I can review and bring them into other software.

There should be programming specs, so they know how to find the detective's journals, and check if they've been updated with fresh discoveries. I didn't include a "new headlines" balloon or ticker in the detective's features. The detective isn't a newsreader.

The detective should listen to your newsreaders too. Your newsreaders should also push the locations of your subscription lists ("you can find what Phil is reading at http://...") to the detective. This way the detective can optimize its reports by checking your subscriptions, then excluding them from discoveries. 

Let me browse and edit my discoveries in a human-usable form. I may want to delete items from my history before sharing them with a newsreader.  

I have an identity that lives across multiple computers and cell phones. I'll have detectives on each. My detectives should be able to confer and harmonize their discoveries. I may have multiple users on any computer, so detection prefs and journals should be aware of user profiles.

What's the business case?

• Strategy: Environmental Awareness. What's the cost of missing that a trusted feed has moved? That a key customer/competitor/regulator has a new feed? What if we made our collective surfing of the Internet into a competitive analysis tool, each person contributing their view of the world? With detectives on everyone's desk, we're less likely to be surprised, more likely to catch new opportunities, and be smarter as a group than our competitors.
• IT: Enterprise System Integration with Newsreaders. We're creating feeds of all sorts of information, including RSS of our SAP transactions. Many of these feeds will be customized for a specific context ("here's the RSS for orders Mary should approve.") The detective does away with error-prone cutting and pasting, automating the process of "I want to follow up on this". These feeds will drive attention to workflow and process. Some of the feeds will trigger people to write about specific items in team and project weblogs, improving communication.

I'll pay $20 retail for this.

Assuming you have an intranet blog server and either a server based news aggregator or desktop newsreaders, what would you pay for a 100 user site license?

Do you want one?

Community Services for Enterprise Blognets

While your firewall protects you from intrusion, it also cripples the community software that keeps the blogosphere hopping. Here's are some of the services you might want to bring inside to help your blognets grow and prosper. The list grows, changes, and is not complete.  

I've grouped these services, arbitrarily, into three categories: Discovery, Reading, and Writing. Discovery services help you find stuff and navigate, and understand blognets and the blogosphere as a whole. Reading services help you keep up with relevant information. Writing helps you author and publish. Basic blogging service is extra.

In your workplace:

1. Which 3 are mandatory for a blognet pilot?
2. What risks do you assume if you don't provide these services?
3. Which services might you be better off operating in support of public employee and customer weblogs, even though they are the open blogosphere's services?
4. What policy and IT operations issues do these services raise?

Service	Description
Discovery
Intranet search	Covering the intranet and DMZ, your private search engine must update its index frequently. Best is if they re-index within a few minutes of fan update server being pinged. Engines which work well in public, because they use hypertext links to establish relevance, may not work as well in the intranet, where there are fewer links or other cues. For example, the Google appliance.
Location tagging and search service	Find blogs physically near me; find posts related to a location or system. For example, Geourl.org.
Referral logs	Who's sending traffic to me? It's sometimes useful to understand your readership. Other times you discover people with similar interests.
Weblog neighborhood	Who is like me? Who writes about things like me? Who else is cited like me? For example, Technorati link cosmos.
Topic service	Find posts related to this one within my weblog, across the intranet, and perhaps across a collection of partner blognets. See K-collector and Easy News Topics.
Realspace	Generate live meetings using information from blogspace. For example, Meetup or Evite.
Random walk	Manufacture serendipity. Sample the intranet, get a bigger picture. See also wanderlust.
Directory	So you have an employee directory, maybe even a yellow pages for services and departments. How about extending the yellow pages to people, by topic, updated automatically? For example, see blogarama, Eatonweb, Oblix.
Advertising	Text ads for internal announcements. Think of it as the new bulletin board.
Cemetery	A directory of abandoned weblogs, because of personnel actions, lack of interest, or because their focus or relationship is completed. See Fucked Weblog.
Product or object watch	Analyze weblogs for well-understood references, store and analyze the results, and notify subscribers. For example, seeing what books people mention in their weblogs. Or people. Or competitor products.
Peopleroll and social network	I'm sharing some of my friends, and friends of friends. See FOAF, Friendster, Ryze.
Reading
RSS portals	server side directories of RSS feeds, aggregation and browser presentation of those feeds
Updates	What's new? A central service that writing tools notify when a blog is updated. Sometimes called a "ping service". Like weblogs.com and blo.gs.
Blogroll & WebRing services	May be linked to enterprise directory services, the better to provide automatic maintenance of blogrolls that match the formal org chart. Of more value, giving users the ability to create their own blogrolls. This reveals informal and temporary social networks. Blogrolling.com is an example.
Blog distribution gateway	Distributes blog posts by email, SMS or other channels.
Buzz watcher	What's hot on the intranet? What's hot in my circle? Services that answer this include Blogpulse, DayPop News Burst, Popdex, and Blogdex
News Readers and Aggregators	Aggregators collect a user's selection of RSS feeds, keeping them current, formating them for reading, and making them available for users to cross-post. News readers do the same thing, except from a user's desktop. Server side aggregators have the effect of concentrating traffic (they pick an RSS feed only once, instead of each user picking it up) so publishers don't experience "slashdot effects". They also hide the level of attention from publishers, useful if the publisher is a competitor or industry insider. Syndic8 is an example.
Re-aggregation service	These services combine content from multiple sources into a more focused feed. This can be fully automated or humans may approve contributions to a feed. Moreover is an example.
Machine translation	Do you span countries? Machine translations of posts and RSS feeds helps people get the gist of what their colleagues write. Systrans is an example.
Writing
Posting Gateways	Use these services to write to your weblog using non-browser devices or software. Post from voicemail, your phone's SMS/MMS, email, calendar, or IM.
Comment Service	Manages posted comments like the blog server manages weblog posts.
Conversation Threading	Tracks the flow of conversation across weblogs using methods like trackback and link analysis.
Render Services	These convert blog posts to RSS, and to document formats like PowerPoint .ppt, Flash .swf, Adobe Acrobat .pdf, or Microsoft Word .doc.
Template Farm, Widget Library	Stores styles, templates, graphics and other ways to customize the look and feel of your blog.
Weblog Medic	Checks your blog for dead links, broken images, speed, accessibility, valid RSS and html, language encoding, etc. For example, BlogCheckup.
Blog Fodder	Actively provoke blogging by suggesting themes or topics. For example, blogfodder and The Friday Five.

[a klog apart]

I use AltaVista's Babel Fish to follow the CNBlog.org site. Through garbled translations, you can hear the enthusiasm and insight of this collective blog. Their RSS feed.

They're writing about the Hangzhou flashmobs, the Weblogs, Inc. launch, a Chinese wikipedia, Google's Search by Location, and rural China education. 

Interesting to me: a new Chinese blogging service, Blog Village with about 400 blogs.  

As long as we're talking about sound, I want scheduled text-to-speech conversion of pre-selected RSS feeds. Speak them into an MP3 file. Automatically download them to an iPod for offline listening at the gym or during a commute. Feeds become folders, posts become files, to help with navigation.

While you're doing it, check the RSS feeds for audio enclosures. Download those too.

[a klog apart]

Checking in with Nico Lumma of noch'n blogg and a fellow survivor of the Blogtalk conference. A few items:

He and his wife have their first baby. Congratulations!

Thinking about what blogging's official theme song should be

• recognize that blogging ring tone
• stop a blogger on the street
• to play at awards ceremonies

Nominees:

• Abba, just because they capture the spirit so well
• Johnny Cash, whose death was widely blogged
• No fleetwood mac
• The Greatful Dead, but hard to blog to

The new rage in Germany: Karaoke Blogging. The site, Karaokeblogging.de, has been climbing the blogg.de and blogcensus charts in the last month. Building on the richness and immediacy of audioblogging, karaoke blogging is a higher form of social software (unless you don't like karaoke). The first time I heard a fully karaoked blog, I was blown away by the sonified experience. Update: Now in English at Karaokeblogging.com.

I'm a fan of 1-click karaoke blogging, great usability. But they should not file for a patent. The backlash might stifle karaokeblogging in its infancy.  

A few technical concerns:

1. I am hoping for ENT 1.0 support soon, the better to navigate both the songbook libraries and karaokebloggers' mp3 recordings.
2. They must add Atom support to exploit integration and syndication of the Karaoke midi xml format with the blog item data model.
3. Move from their poorly formed RSS feed to a valid RSS 2.0 feed, to support the KAI xml namespace. How are we supposed to adjust our newsreaders to support the feeds if they aren't well formed? Also, RSS enclosures would help stream new karaoke, midi and mp3 files in the background, so I can wake up to a newsreader full of the latest from my favorite performers.
4. There is some debate over whether you should permit more than song per blog post. I support Nico's idea that more karaoke is better.
5. Not sure if it works in Opera.

The business applications are obvious. So I'll be covering them in my BloggerCon session next weekend. See you there.

- phil

First, if you use Radio or manila with post title links, as I do, MyYahoo!'s RSS reader considers them the post permalink.

Usenet as Prelude to Blog. - Sep 4 7:43pm Steffanie , this is for you. How did Usenet anticipate blogging? Place. Usenet preceded the web in establishing a Weinbergerian  sense of place , a commons. Blogs create places too. Immedia...

Dave is thinking small (for a change). - Sep 5 7:43pm Dave Winers  Tips for Candidates re Weblogs is handy. But its just advice on gaming/joining the blogosphere. It will become standard political tradecraft, but it falls short of changing...

Tonight: Film Industry Meetup, 8pm. - Sep 6 7:43pm Film Industry . My local TypePad , MetaFilter , and Edwards in 2004 meetups were cancelled; too few signups. This is about mediablog literacy . Im not a videographer. But I have a cheap webcam, vide...

Atom WeblogLifeCycleAPI? - Sep 7 7:43pm Should there be blog lifecycle capability built into the Atom API? For example, Create a new weblog Freeze, retire, suspend a weblog Merge weblogs x, y, and z Delete a weblog Copy or move...

Second, it sticks a space before commas and periods, but only sometimes.

Third, it isn't updating.

Fourth, I can no longer access the blog component editor.

Fifth, the dates seem to be wrong. One is even listed a week in the future.

Wassup?

[a klog apart]

Lycos, AOL, and Yahoo! have blogging systems, all in their early days. (MSN is a long way from launching a blogging service, per conversations with Microsoft folks.)

Scoundrel David Galbraith [have you read his blog?] is skeptical about the advantages of Yahoo! blogging and fears that when the big portals come online, they won't be part of the greater blogosphere. Socialist Ross Mayfield [what else do you call a SocialText founder?] sees techno-isolationism as a competitive disadvantage for both bloggers and their hosts. Cluetrain hobo Dana Blankenhorn [riding the rails, seeing where they're takiing us] imagines AOL breaking the fabric of the blogosphere's social networks.    

Maybe. Maybe not.

Here's what the Bigs bring:

Legitimacy. AOL already knows you. You already trust AOL. So trying to blog isn't so risky, and takes less effort.

Digital ID means control. AOL can use its user profiles to let bloggers control who reads and writes in journals and comments. Incredibly difficult to do without the experience of setting up parental controls, training users to manage permissions, and configuring application servers with strong security. Also hard to do unless you have a critical mass of participants in the ID system, very hard for smaller, independent blog hosts.

Integration with the whole experience. This could be huge. I expect AOL and Yahoo! to hybridize blogs with their other services and surfaces. RSS feeds into your customized home page. Buddy lists mapped to blogrolls. Mailing lists merged into RSS feeds. Blog posts on some topics routed to your online groups. Show which blogrolled people are available for instant messaging. Attach the personal version of your blog to dating profile. Attach the professional version of your blog to your career profile. Post via your already linked mobile phone account. Audio and videoblog using existing broadband services.

Recommendations, better than ever. With time and economic health, I expect innovation. The hottest opportunity: recommender engines, software that suggests. Inform your search for a potential employee with fresh blog content and social network information. Target advertising based not just on what people view but what people write and cite. Recommend discussion threads or forums (or hot dates) based on common interests.

Content In and Out. This is a two way street. AOL and Yahoo! have mountains of content that don't do too much for their online venues. News, music, and educational assets. The Bigs may be able to repurpose the flow of new content as blogfodder, triggering citations in user blogs. Imagine that two celebs kiss on an MTV special. If AOL makes it effortless to post pictures and citations about a blogworthy item, they're pumping a meme into the blogosphere and Googlespace. That translates into web and televsion ratings, maybe even political influence. That's portal to blog. The other direction is that blogspace is content, worthy of reading and surfing in its own right.  

Enterprise Products. Yahoo! still offers MyYahoo and PIM services packaged for businesses. Google's been building up its search appliance products. A little dab of blogging may help sales, absent significant klogging competitor.

That's the potential. Will they understand and exploit it? Will they stick to it despite execution hickups?

[a klog apart]

For example,

• Create a new weblog
• Freeze, retire, suspend a weblog
• Merge weblogs x, y, and z
• Delete a weblog
• Copy or move an entire weblog from this server to that server
• Create a new weblog by extracting some content from weblog x

This would enable programmatic control over a weblog by an authorized system or person.

For instance, you may want your HR system to automatically generate a weblog for each new employee, and freeze it when the employee leaves the company. Or to manage multiple blog servers (made by different vendors) using one admin tool. [PhilWolff]