Phil Wolff: Blue Sky Radio

Cooking with Amy has an RSS feed!

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 03:41:12 GMT

Eat your Cooking with Amy via RSS and Atom.

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

Your blog's soul is its writing form; that soul's expression is its home page.

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 20:24:55 GMT

What makes blogging different than wikis or other web sites? Among other factors, blogs emphasize the home page over site hierarchy. This lowers a blog reader's and a blog writer's cognitive burden. Three examples:

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.
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.
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]

Wishlist: The Standalone RSS Autodetective Client

Mon, 05 Jan 2004 19:43:05 GMT

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

Wed, 08 Oct 2003 19:19:49 GMT

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:

Which 3 are mandatory for a blognet pilot?
What risks do you assume if you don't provide these services?
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?
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.

I'll be updating this page for a while. "akasig"

CNblog: Chinese metabloggers.

Mon, 29 Sep 2003 17:49:12 GMT

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.

skypememe: RSS to MP3 to iPod

Sun, 28 Sep 2003 22:59:59 GMT

"smlogo"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. "akasig"

From Japan via Hamburg: Karaokeblogging.

Sun, 28 Sep 2003 00:09:38 GMT

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:

I am hoping for ENT 1.0 support soon, the better to navigate both the songbook libraries and karaokebloggers' mp3 recordings.
They must add Atom support to exploit integration and syndication of the Karaoke midi xml format with the blog item data model.
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.
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.
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

MyYahoo! RSS reader errors.

Sun, 07 Sep 2003 22:08:06 GMT

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? "akasig"

What do the Bigs bring to blogging?

Fri, 05 Sep 2003 01:57:18 GMT

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? "akasig"

Atom WeblogLifeCycleAPI?

Mon, 01 Sep 2003 06:23:33 GMT

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 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]

RSS from BugTracker

Sat, 30 Aug 2003 03:05:26 GMT

"manmachinelogo"Marc Pasc:

As I linked, recently folks mentioned bug trackers as weblogs. My bug tracker of choice is Roundup, and I've been feeling the similarity some, though at the aggregation end: I've been quite wanting Roundup to publish RSS somehow.

So last night when I should've been sleeping, after a false start trying to make an RSS template, I wrote a Roundup detector that writes "RSS 2.0." (Ugh, am I ever feeling it today.) I put RSS 2.0 in scare quotes because it doesn't validate: I didn't know how to turn an issue Date into the proper <pubDate> format, so it's in the wrong format. Richard told me how on the roundup-users list, so I'll fix it some time, but that posted version won't make valid RSS 2.0.

This is the first half of the round trip:

Roundup to RSS
RSS to Reader
Reader to Blog

Missing: Roundup should be able to consume bugs, and comments on bugs, posted to a blogger's RSS feeds.

Semantic Blogging Demonstrator: follow-up.

Wed, 27 Aug 2003 22:37:37 GMT

The New Scientist article came out (nothing online). From the project blog.

The semantic blogging demonstrator has quite a broad scope. The idea is to enrich a blog with semantic metadata and then to do cool things with that metadata. The article describes a way to get metadata into the blog in the first place, using assisted categorisation. That is indeed an essential part of the picture. But once we have that, we can use that metadata to drive the blog view (semantic view), guide our browsing (semantic navigation) and search more effectively (semantic query). This is pretty much the vision I outlined at blogtalk. And we are working on the functionality to demonstrate (in a modest way) that vision.

Semantic Blogging and the HP demonstrator.

Sun, 24 Aug 2003 07:28:02 GMT

About three weeks' ago I responded to an inquiry from New Scientist reporter Duncan Graham-Rowe about HP's semantic blogging project. This post updates my comments to Duncan, my posts from this blog, and contributions to the Pie wiki.

Steve Cayzer presented Semantic Blogging for Bibliography Management at the 2003 Blogtalk conference. HP labs is running the project as one of several semantic web demonstration pilots. Bloggers get to add research-appropriate references to their blogs, with the data structures preserved at each step in a blogging ecology (blog CMS, UI, syndication, aggregation, newsreader, and presentation).

What's a structure-enahnced blog item?

Packages of structured data are becoming post components.

The virtue of blogs has been their simplicity. Each post only needs one field, and maybe a title and url.

Not everyone is served well by this lowest common denominator. Sometimes you have a burning need for more structure, at least some of the time.

When you know a subject deeply, and your observations or analysis recur, you may be best served by filling in a form. The form will have its own metadata and its own data model.

Consider a school soccer coach. An after-game report typically includes:

which teams played,
where and when,
officials, and
a list of game events
- who scored (and when and how),
- who received penalties (when and for what), etc.).

Wouldn't it be handy for your blogging tool to:

understand this structure,
present an editing form,
render the form in html to your blog, and
render the post (including the form) to your rss feed?

News aggregators and news readers should be able to:

Autodiscover an unknown structure.
Notify the user that a new structure is available.
Learn the structure, including entry forms, pick list sources, rendering guidance, and default style sheets.
Make it available when the blogger is ready to write.

So how would you use this? Broadly,

people get to express themselves and
blogs start to interoparate with enterprise applications.

Recipes and Golf Scores:

You should be able to define your own structure. The most common use of Microsoft Excel is making lists of things. No reason blogs can't give similar freedom to define a new package. Build from scratch or on the shoulders of other package definitions. Just for diversity sake:

What I'm listening to now. (with enough info that a newsreader could find and play that tune, when the package comes in via RSS.)
Concert review. (3 points for lighting, 2 for sound, 4 for audience involvement, ...)
Strange things in my referral log. (A real blog)
Beer reviews. (A real blog)
Dating reports. (6 stars on manners, 9 on heat, 2 on wardrobe, ...)
Burning man barter "haves" and "wants"

Interop with enterprise applications:

So I define a "new customer bio" structure. My customer relationship management system writes RSS for me that includes new customer info. Not only can I cite that post in my blog, but:

my blog can notify the CRM via trackback
the CRM can take note of the permalink of my post (for CRM users), and
the CRM can append changes to data I made with my blogging tool ("He's not really the decision maker.").

Along the way...

information locked inside an enterprise system become visible to our intranet search engine via my blog.
more useful content finds its way into enterprise systems.
transactional data takes on context.

If you're building it, what are some of the architectural concerns?

Adaptive. Either you're going to create a special purpose blogging tool, something that understands one particular semantic structure, like rsearch citations. Or you're going to create tools that permit ongoing discovery, learning, and adaptation to new structures.
Structure Preserving. You should be able to pass along anything.
Include Inline vs. by Reference. Lots of debate over this.

Some real world examples:

Qlogger
- Sub-schemas describe activities (golfing, commuting) and reviews (movies, marijuana). You can see how this creates more comparable data (show me all the movie reviews by warbloggers rated 4 out of 5 stars). Coming soon are trend charts so you can see if you golf game is getting better or getting worse, or if you commute times are better on some days.
JemBlog
- The Jena Semantic Web Server.
- evelopment Diary, Notes, Download, Mailing List, SourceForge
The Lafayette Project (2003 Q2?)
- From Meg Hourihan's talk at Reboot (20 June 2003)
  - Today, you can review a book on your blog and a review on Amazon. It would be better if you could just tell Amazon about the review on your site. More distributed. It would be cool to link recipes/reviews to Epicurious and collaboratively filter that info (people who cooked this, also cooked this). You get to own your content but connect with others, retain copyright but still participate in your discussion.
- What is the Lafayette Project? by Nick Denton

What can happen if lots of people use structure-enhanced blogs?

Individual use may look like this...

Bakers define recipe formats.
They teach them to their weblog tool (defining a form).
They post recipes.
Posts with recipes are syndicated.
Other bloggers notice the new format. By autodiscovery. By reading weblogs with structured content (sports scores in a nice table, for example).
They add it to their own blogging tool.
Then when they compose a new post, they can pick components to add (Pillsbury Commercial Recipe Format, imdb Movie Review Format (supported by Amazon), HR department's vacation survey).
You manage your list of formats, retiring some, promoting others.
Formats proliferate through the blogosphere. Some become de facto leaders for a type of content or transaction. Others carve out niches, perhaps associated with a vendor or an industry.

Collectively, the blogosphere becomes adaptive.

Most people will still do plain old blogging, lucky if they use a title or main link.
Many will occasionally use a structure. Especially as Blog This buttons proliferate. So you can post an SAP invoice to your intranet blog, for example.
Others will find a few formats that tie in closely with a deep interest or passion, or their jobs. A runner's diary. A movie review. A project status report.
Enterprise applications will read components. So information will flow between the modestly structured blogosphere and the highly structured business infrastructure. For example,

I'm a Macy's buyer.
I get an echo feed from J.D.OracleSoft for orders processed in my category.
I post some of them to my team weblog, marking them up with comments about the intended customers, thoughts about the vendor meeting, and terms that didn't fit in the software (front row seats for the family).
J.D.OracleSoft reads my feed, looking for changes to the order, and adding the post's permalink to the transaction record.

In the list of working examples, I mentioned Qlogger, the first blogging service that publishes structured blogs. Qlogger today isn't the whole semantic blog picture. While they format blogs according to their structures, (a) they don't publish those structures in a machine readable format like XML, and (b) they don't provide a programmatic way to ask questions of the server using those structures. For example, show me the most popular running shoe by people who jog less than 5 miles.

Back to the juicy stuff at HP labs...

The HP demonstrator requirements are brilliant.

First, they will show that tools, augmented by the semantic web, can create convenience and value for individual participants. In their test, they're helping researchers to cite more and better with less effort.

Second, they show that decentralized ideas and information, created and exposed using the tools of the semantic web, create synergy and and community benefits. It will be easy to see which citations are more popular, to find like-minded researchers based on citations, and to form new communities of practice using this information. By building semantic tools along the edge of the Internet, new patterns of user behavior and information should emerge from the links and content that connect them.

Third, the project will showcase blogs integrated into other information systems. This portends your blogging tools evolving into personal portals. So you'll read not just other blogs but also feeds from your favorite workplace software. We already see blogs that enhance posts before publishing by automatically grabbing related links from Google and appending them to the post. The demonstrator makes that a two way conversation, between bloggers and the existing world of IT services and applications.

Maybe the most valuable contribution will be giving scientists and technologists a gut sense of how the semantic web will feel as a user. After that, it's just engineering and a field day for the social scientists.

Also noteworthy, Easy News Topics by Matt Mower (England) and Paolo Valdemarin (Italy) is a protocol that lets people add ontologic context to blog posts (e.g. this post is about /animals/things-that-live-in-the-water/fish/salmon) while continually improving and shaping topic trees in a distributed way. As each blog grows to hold thousands of posts (hey, a few posts a day adds up), we'll need ways to help us find posts by topic. ENT is a parallel effort to make it easy to share those topic notations. "akasig"

John Robb to Google: Match ads to the post, not the page.

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 16:07:11 GMT

This would allow the inclusion of ads within RSS (not ad boxes, but simple text with the label advertisement). I really don't want to see ads in my RSS, but it is inevitable. For qualified content, like what I am working on with the Weblog Network, it is a must.

Won't you have greater matching precision by looking at all the posts in a given feed? "akasig"

The web can know me.

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 07:43:57 GMT

Steve Kirks reimagines the future of blogging. It is a beautiful, elegant vision. I want the drugs he's taking.

Create a different kind of aggregator, one that's a browser first and RSS reader second.

Read the rest...

Education needs semantic blogging.

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 02:45:04 GMT

via Raymond Yee, Terry Anderson's talk at Merlot2003 Beyond Learning Objects: Towards the Educational Semantic Web, reported by Greg Ritter.

RSS Flow, Measured.

Mon, 11 Aug 2003 05:59:46 GMT

Tim Bray measured the RSS traffic to his personal weblog. He came up with these numbers for a day with one change:

11,526 GET requests (about 8 per minute)
8,901 returned the no-change (code 304) 77%
2,625 returned the data (code 200). 23%
359 HEAD requests.
1,374 unique IP addresses.

Tim's work with Antarctica.net touches thousands of people. His professional network will be early adopters, so tracking Tim's blog would be natural.

Of note, Tim made a change. "The code that changes the picture-of-the-day every ten minutes or so was also as a side-effect re-writing the RSS. So I fixed it." It's probably saving him 1.5 GB/month in downloads. Who's going to write the book on RSS optimization?

Scaling Echo: P2P and Cached Feeds, and Ping Servers.

Sun, 10 Aug 2003 16:06:23 GMT

About four weeks' ago I wrote about Scaling Echo: P2P and Cached Feeds. I drew a few conclusions:

The syndicated blogosphere will reach 300 million feeds in 3 years
Feed payloads will grow 100 to 10,000 times
Each reader may consume 1000 feeds
Syndication Growth = Denial Of Service
Two architectures will support this scale:
- Peer-To-Peer (P2P)
- Caching by intermediaries (communal aggregators)

Jevon wrote about scaling new post pinging.

We need to have aggregators that send their subscriptions into a cloud and get pings back that have gone in to that cloud at any other point. It could be called a "peer to peer subscription and message delivery system", or "distributed redundant notification network", or whatever. But as soon as we can build a message network layer, Microcontent will really be ready for the next level: integration into our active lives.

Phrases like "community ping relay servers", "supernode", and "ping cloud" make my day.

[a klog apart klogs]

An interview with RSSJobs creator, Steve Rose.

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 23:26:30 GMT

I've been following two things very closely for many years: content syndication and labor markets. Last week RSSJobs was announced, bringing the two together. Here's my interview with Steve Rose who built RSSJobs.

What inspired or provoked you to create RSSJobs?

It was a combination of things. First was the frustration with my own job hunt. Like many IT professionals, I was unemployed for 6 months. When I did finally find a job, it was for half my previous pay, and in a environment I never would have considered otherwise. Even after starting that job, I was still job hunting. Every morning I was greeted with emails from Monster, and Dice, and several others with the results of my saved search agents. They were pretty useless. Monster only allowed 5 agents, and the emails only had up to 5 jobs per agent. I had to go to Monster's web site to see all the results. Then there was Dice. It gave me up to 50 jobs for each agent every day. Most of them were the same as the previous day's results! They were supposed to be just the new ones. I was spending all my morning time before work weeding through these, and I rarely had time to check any other sites that I didn't get emails from. Sites that didn't get updated every day went un-checked for weeks or months. Who knows how many potential jobs I missed out on because I didn't have time to check all the sites I wanted to check for updates.

Second was exposure to "RSS". I started reading all my web based news using NetNewsWire earlier this year, and was amazed at how much easier it was to keep up. So I stared playing with the RSS format, creating some feeds for my own personal use, and I thought this would be useful for checking a local University's job board. I wrote a quick java servlet to parse the new job listing and return the results as RSS. It was so cool! Not long after that, I added Dice and Monster to the mix.

At this point, it was all just for my own use. About 2 weeks later, I went on a job interview, and when asked what kind of personal projects I had, I mentioned this and described the benefits of RSS. One of the developers interviewing me knew about RSS, and thought it was very good idea. He said I should market it. So I came up with a simple business plan, adapted my servlets to a subscription-based model, and built a web site around it.

How would you describe what RSSJobs does?

RSSJobs is simply a search agent for other job boards. It takes search parameters from the user, searches the job boards they want, and returns the results to them in RSS.

Who is it for?

Ideally, RSSJobs is for anyone looking for a job on the internet. It is well suited to individuals who have jobs, but want to keep their eyes open to other positions, and don't have the time to do an exhaustive search every day.

That being said, the average person out there doesn't know about RSS yet, and has a hard time understanding the benefits. It's a paradigm shift for most people, making adoption of RSS more difficult. Web browsers are comfortable, and people don't want to give them up, despite their limitations.

So at this point, I don't expect most job hunters out there to "get" the benefits of using RSSJobs, so I am not targeting them just yet. Right now I am focusing on those who are already using RSS. As RSS use becomes more widespread, the target audience will expand.

When did it go live?

The official live date was August 1, 2003. The site has been up for a few weeks, but only myself and a few friends knew about it.

What's your day job? What's your technical background?

I am a Software Engineer. As a Software Engineer, I have done a little bit of everything. My strongest language is Java, but I also work in C/C++, as well as various 4GL type languages. I've done application, database, web, and multimedia development, sometimes all on the same project.

What programming tools did you use to construct RSSJobs? What platform are you running the apps on?

It was developed using Java 1.4.1, and currently hosted on Mac OS X Server 10.2.

What version(s) of RSS do you produce?

RSS 2.0

What do you think of the Echo project? Will you be supporting the new syndication formats?

I don't know much about the Echo project, but I plan to closely follow the market for RSS content. If other formats gain popularity, I will consider supporting them as well.

Most of the job boards bar "reverse engineering" and other screen scraping, concerned over theft of data by rivals and disintermediation. How does your design work around or through these concerns?

I have considered this, and I don't expect there to be an issue. The site clearly states that the user is searching other job sites. The job listings from the various boards are accessed on demand, and nothing is cached by RSSJobs. There is no attempt to mask the origin of the content. If the user wants more information about the job, they are sent to the job board, where they can apply for the job if they like. Users should still register and upload their resumes to the job boards being searched for maximum efficiency.

I liken what RSSJobs does to a personal assistant or agent who does the research requested by a client, and presents the results. For example, say my friend doesn't have internet access, but wants to use Monster.com in his job search. He asks me to search for jobs for him. Is there anything wrong with me typing in his keywords, downloading the results, and putting a summary of the listings in an Excel spreadsheet on a floppy disk for my friend to look through? It seems perfectly reasonable to me. RSSJobs does essentially the same thing.

Many employers use HR information systems that output job listings in an HR-XML format for bulk uploading to Monster and most of the big job boards. What kind of information is lost between employer and candidate?

I have no idea.

What's on your wishlist for news reader features?

I would like to see an RSS Reader that could manage the items from an RSS feed as individual items. A user could archive specific items for viewing later after it is no longer included in the feed. Adding locally-stored comments to an item would be a nice feature too.

Is there anything employers could do to make your job easier when searching jobs.Acme.com?

Yes, when they post jobs, keep the content simple. No embedded HTML tags, or other things that RSSJobs has to filter to keep the XML valid.

Where do you think the other bottlenecks are in getting work to workers?

I think the biggest problem is getting the word out about available jobs. There are so many different ways jobs get announced, between Job Boards, classifieds, and company web sites, it is hard to keep track of them all. RSSJobs is trying to help with that.

Where do you see RSSJobs going?

For now, RSSJobs is just a part-time endeavor. If it helps people out, and provides enough revenue to cover the hosting costs, I will be happy. It will expand slowly, adding new features and more search sites on an ongoing basis. Ideally, I'd like to grow it large enough to become a full time job, and maybe even provide a few jobs as well. But this is not going to be another .com flame-out, trying to become too big too fast. I've been part of that already. If the demand for RSSjobs is there, it will grow to meet that demand. If not, no-one is going to loose money over it.

What kind of feedback have you been getting from new users? What have you been learning from the RSSJobs experience?

Surprisingly, I have received very little direct feedback about it. What I have received has been positive, even excited, with a few requests for features I have already considered for the future. But the loudest statement has also been the quietest one. People are using the site! The site is still in its early stages, and I don't want more volume than I can handle, so I haven't done much to promote it yet. The little bit I have done has drawn more traffic than I could have expected, and people are actually using the site as it was intended. that says everything.

What have I learned? I'm not sure I have learned anything yet. It is all happening so fast, and things have gone remarkably well, almost too well. It's when things go wrong, particularly very wrong, when you learn the most. I'm sure that will come. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

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I Want Something New .

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 16:37:38 GMT

Brad Wilson's I Want Something New thread.

I want new blog software.

Now, there's nothing wrong with the crop of blog software out there, but it all pretty much works the same. I'm not even sure what I want different... I just want something different. What I want, really, is something so radically different that it's hard to even call it "blog software".

My contribution to the thread...

Blog anything.

On request, blog more richly structured things (like sports scores, recipes, SAP transaction approvals). [xml packages, schema for structure, css for formatting, xul for edit layouts]

Syndicate anything.
Make it easy to define new kinds of things. And share them by blogging them.
Have your blogging tools discover and learn to use new kinds of things. On the fly.

Machine Blogging: Microsoft SharePoint to intranet RSS.

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 06:57:12 GMT

"ManMachineLogo"The folks at NewsGator share a case study.

Triple Point Technology has transformed the way they share information within the enterprise. From critical build and release notifications, to internal publishing and collaboration, publishing via RSS has dramatically changed their information landscape.

Michael Sippey summarizes:

It's not really about weblogs at all, rather it's about how RSS (or whatever you want to call it) can be used to augment typical email- and web-based collaboration systems. Key points:

Feeds are generated not only by individuals, but also by teams, and by software. They publish the output of their release management system in RSS. They've retrofitted Sharepoint to output RSS streams for watched folders.
They're driving the posts right into their mail client (Outlook), which is where info workers seem to spend an inordinate amount of time. No need for training on a new piece of software, and power users can customize views to their heart's content.
The subscription model is much more efficient and user-driven than internal mail archives. A couple of years ago I wrote a piece for theobvious on how I wanted Yahoo Groups for my intranet. The key thing there was (a) discovery and (b) user control over subscription. An "OPML" directory and user-controlled aggregator solves that problem. No more sysadmin time dealing with "hey, can you put me on this list for the next few weeks while I monitor what's going on with this project?"

If the blog/feed/echo/rss whatever thing takes off inside large organizations, and thousands of people, teams and systems inside companies like IBM or HP or Sun start blogging, there's gotta be a market for the intranet equivalent of blo.gs where users could learn of recently updated feeds they don't subscribe to, find new ones based on existing subscription lists, etc. (Question: is anyone selling software like this today? To slurp up user's OPML files and discover relationships and create an interlinked directory?)

Sippey gets it. So does Triple Point.

AOL Journiverse comment space with one Digital ID. What a difference!

Thu, 24 Jul 2003 07:48:28 GMT

Anyone can read an AOL Journal. But you need an AOL login to add a comment.

So, no anonymous / pseudonymous comments.

This also means I have exactly one public identity on all journal guestbooks and comment systems. I must maintain one universal persona, one identity to go along with my one ID for the entire AOL Journiverse.

This is a different social construct. I can't separately shield my family on a medical blog, be caustic on a political blog, speak for my company to a disgruntled consumer, or talk romance in another. One AOL ID, plain to see (and search), everywhere.

This feels less free to me. Is this an OK sensibility in the AOL world?

Will people sign up with AOL or get an AIM account just to post comments? Maybe. Or will they shun the AOLjourniverse? Either way, AOL should experiment with other choices.

MachineBlogging: Post to eBay.

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 10:31:50 GMT

An interaction designer shared this idea at Saturday's Santa Clara Blogger Pizza dinner. Simple, really.

Post to eBay from your weblog.

He imagines using the blog author's UI to compose your basic data. Stick in your pictures, your descriptions, etc. There would be a few extra fields needed, elements like eBay ID, product metadata, offer types; three more minutes, tops.

When you post to your blog, you also publish to the eBay API.

How about using one of your blogs to drive off-eBay traffic to your eBayed products? Good for you, good for eBay.

It takes a long time to add a new product using eBay's normal UI, as much as 40-50 minutes. Huge value in saving users time and simplifying the experience. More products posted more frequently by more people.

"ManMachineLogo"So, that's from blogger to machine. How about eBay writing to the blogosphere? (This is me, not the eBayer.)

Are you one of the millions who spend hours every week with blogs, blog newsreaders, and blogging tools? Would you like it if eBay created private feeds for you?

New eBay categories
Confirming items you list for sale - notification
New items in categories you follow
Bids and bidder information for items you are selling
Lists of items you're selling through eBay (an eBayroll?)
lists of items you bid on

From eBay's view, this looks like:

an auxilliary way to alert customers, sharpening the sense of immediacy and urgency around current transactions
a 1-to-1 marketing tool to draw customers back
putting more marketing tools in seller hands, the better to exploit the growing blogosphere

From a blogger's view, custom eBay feeds feel like:

responsive customer service
control
alerts for trading behavior
triggers for blogging behavior

eBay can do more to leverage the blogosphere, of course.

Start with permalinks everywhere: every comment, bid, product, seller, buyer, category, etc.
Eliminate financial friction. eBay charges to connect via XML and their API.

["aka" "klogs"]

Machine Blogging: Programmers sought for project: CVS to weblog/RSS, and back.

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 07:02:33 GMT

CVS as Blogger. Bill Lazar seeks programmers interested in bootstrapping a new system. Improve project communication by having your codebase blog.

Yes, blog.

You're all busy doing your own thing, coding here, checking stuff in there, testing this, trying that. Common point of reality? The code. Keeper of the reality? Your configuration management system.

Bill's solution: Wrap common events in plain english and post them to a weblog. Syndicate the results if you like. Add your project CVS to your blogroll. Comment on your CVS's posts in your own blog.

Wanted: Programmers and QA folks interested in making a tool that will extend the five most popular code management systems with a blogging interface. Contact Product Manager Bill. Bill is an alum of both Sun and Pyra, has a Rutgers MBA, and is polishing his C# in his spare time.

p.s. Bill pays attention to movies in the works. Very cool. He's interested in syndicating this content while preserving its structure. Any suggestions?

Steve Gillmor says email is a subset of RSS. You betcha.

Mon, 14 Jul 2003 21:12:03 GMT

Microcontent. It's a big big idea.

My shot of Dave Winer taking pictures over spicy noodles. Everyone had a camera; tres postmodern.

Mine was the smallest (excluding Steve's phone cam) and cheapest. $32.94 on Amazon. Digital. With micro USB cable and a lanyard to wear around my neck.

Steve Gillmor, at last night's Jing Jing Blogger Dinner, had two comments on my email as syndication client post.

First, he thinks I have it backwards. RSS (and its decendents) won't fold into email. Email will fold into newsreader tools. This may be semantics, but I don't think so. Echo is extensible. You will see a wide variety of microcontent formats. Box scores. Supply chain orders. Cat pedigrees (it's a blogging world, after all). Each type with its own editing, display, and storage. So email is just an instance, a special case of microcontent syndication and management.

Second, he sees Microsoft too entrenched in Outlook. So dug in, they can't reimagine it as a general microconent client, let alone completely re-engineer the plumbing. I'll trust him on this; Steve knows many more people at Microsoft than I do. He says that clicking on a link in an Outlook message shouldn't launch an external browser; it should stay in the reader context. If they got it, they'd be working with all forms of content internally.

Meanwhile, all the independent software developers are getting creative. Mail service providers jump at RSS to differentiate themselves. NewsReaders gain features people use to manage overflowing email. Portal makers flow RSS feeds in and out. Blog hosters bake RSS into default templates. Social network and digital ID elements are touching syndication, promising new value for getting messages via syndication server vs. email server.

But aren't InfoPath and the deep XMLization of Microsoft Office evidence of microcontent thinking? RSS/Echo is hot buzz at Microsoft developer conferences. Will Redmond politics amid the product silos fuel the reinvigoration of Outlook as a microcontent client before the third party world completely redefines microcontent messaging?

Maybe.

I think Steve just wants RSS feeds delivered to his Blackberry. For now.