WIFLblog

Sunday, December 07, 2003

There's been lots of talk on the mail lists about making it easier for users to subscribe to sites. Of course, since we went first with Radio, it's very very easy for Radio users, just click on an orange XML coffee mug, where it's available, and confirm that you want to subscribe, and it's done. No copy-paste. Nothing complicated. If we wanted we could have made the url invisible, but we decided that would be too confusing. Now what's the general solution that works for everyone all the time? This is one of those times when, if Microsoft, Apple and Linux could get together, they could upgrade the Internet in a nice way. Probably just Microsoft alone could do it (the others would have to follow). Choose a port which is the Subscription Manager port. Say it's 5350, a random unassigned port. Then when you want to say "click here to subscribe to this website" include a link that looks like this. Since the OS has the Subscription Manager running on that port, it would confirm that you really want to subscribe, and then add the URL to the Desktop Database (on the Mac) or the Registry (Windows) or /usr/subs (Unix). Or whatever. Some place that the aggregators running on the system could watch. Yeah, it makes sense for some part of the aggregation system to migrate into the OS. If any of the OS vendors want advice on this, let me know. [Scripting News]
5:20:00 PM

"Deep Thinking About Weblogs" by Andrew Gromet

worth a read, here is Andrew's recommended reading list at the end of his "Deep Thinking About Weblogs" aricle:

Overviews

http://www.userland.com/whatAreWeblogs - , by Dave Winer
http://radio.weblogs.com/0110772/stories/2002/10/03/personalKnowledgePublishingAndItsUsesInResearch.html - "Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research", by Sébastien Paquet
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/whatMakesAWeblogAWeblog - "What makes a weblog a weblog?", by Dave Winer

End-user tools

http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Weblogs/Tools/Publishers/ - A directory of weblog publishing tools.
http://backend.userland.com/directory/167/aggregators - A directory of news aggregators.

Programmer tools

http://www.xmlrpc.com/directory/1568/bloggingApis - Blogging APIs describe programmatic interfaces for authoring and editing weblog posts. The result has been a proliferation of compatible authoring tools.

Weblogs and society

http://joi.ito.com/joiwiki/EmergentDemocracyPaper - "EmergentDemocracyPaper", by Joichi Ito
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=347932 - "Citizen Bloggers in N.H.?", by Dave Winer, which proposes widespread grass-roots news coverage of the 2004 presidential election by New Hampshire's citizens
http://www.windley.com/2003/05/07.html#a605 - "UEN Tech Summit: Weblogs are Loosely Coupled Conversations", by Phil Windley
http://seblogging.cognitivearchitects.com/stories/storyReader$963 - "Personal Webpublishing as a reflective conversational tool for self-organized learning", by Sebastian Fiedler
http://weblogs.design.fh-aachen.de/owrede/publikationen/weblogs_and_discourse - "Weblogs and Discourse", by Oliver Wrede

3:36:12 PM

Heart of Lightness. Om Malik just gathered a bunch of encouraging thinking from Jacques Vallee, one of the founding fathers of the Internet. (The Heart of the Internet is Vallee's comprehensive history of the subject.) Good reading:What I found most interesting was his passion for weblogs, and why he feels they are going to save the Internet. He sees weblogs as an extension of the computer conferencing concepts he had pioneered."Weblogs are a new form of that and I think this is what the network¹s... [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]
11:23:44 AM