Dave Winer's built a Convention blog iste that aggregates blogs from
people attending the Convention (not just the credentialed ones).
Looks great. Thanks, Dave....
Aggregator inside aggregator09/21/2004 10:57 PM You know whenever people post screenshots of emulators, how it can be
weird to see Windows running on a Mac? (Even weirder if you actually
use an emulator, until you get used to it.)
Here’s a similar side effect of having embedded a browser in
NetNewsWire. (Click for full-size screen shots.)
Even though it’s odd, there’s actually a point to it—we
discovered that some people use multiple aggregators. One for fun
stuff and one for work, that kind of thing.
If one is browser-based and the other embeds a browser, then, well,
hey, you’ve got something like the above.
Dave's Best of 2003
Dave's Best of 200304/09/2004 03:59 PM (See previous post for an explanation of what this post is.)OK, I
realize we're getting a little too deep into 2004 to still be throwing
around Best of 2003 lists. But this is the list I had in mind when I
came up with the idea for the music club … and it's the music that's
still in heavy rotation on the iPod.January's my biggest music month
of the year. Being located in l'il ole Charlottetown, it's pretty
difficult to stay in touch with the new music scene with Magic 93 and
Truro's Big Dog as your primary sources. I...
DAve's ConventionBlog
DAve's ConventionBlog07/23/2004 03:09 PM Dave Winer's built a Convention blog iste that aggregates blogs from
people attending the Convention (not just the credentialed ones).
Looks great. Thanks, Dave....
Jeff
Sandquist is trying to guess what Dave Winer is up to. He has a
great idea. Instead of putting the onus on weblog writers to add
metadata to our posts (I hate putting titles on my posts, for
instance, or even clicking a box when I post) why not give that power
to readers? Let them add the metadata that will make weblog posts more
useful to more people.
By the way, I added a title to this post, but not to the others.
Just so those of you who are reading in RSS news aggregators can see
what it looks like when I take the time to do that.
Dave's Quick Search Deskbar v3.1.8 Beta
Dave's Quick Search Deskbar v3.1.8 Beta12/03/2003 11:08 AM Dave's Quick Search Deskbar launches Google, Yahoo, Switchboard, and
dozens of other searches directly from your desktop taskbar. You type
your search and hit Enter for a regular Google search. It also
features a calculator, clock, translator and currency converter.
[Freeware 463 KB]
Gothamist: Convention Convention Convention08/28/2004 12:45 AM special coverage of the Republican convention .. Local media's
convention coverage .. gothamist roundup of RNC
NYC
gothamist.com/archives/2004/08/26/convention_convention_conventi
on.php track this
site | 3 links
Well, thanks to readers much
more tech-savvy than I am, I think I may be able to get Google to
start
picking up my posts again, and, by tightening up the code of my
blogroll, also make the page load faster for those patient readers
with
dial-up access. So far I have moved the blogroll to the right hand
column, so Google will not get bogged down in the blogroll code and
give up before it gets to the actual posts. In the process I messed up
the masthead, so I've adopted a simple one-piece masthead
temporarily.
If this post works properly, I'll then make an additional change to my
blogroll, stripping out the table HTML and replacing it with a simple
list separated by line breaks. Next post will report on the results of
that. Keep your fingers crossed for me.
DAVE'S NEW BUSINESS BROCHURE
DAVE'S NEW BUSINESS BROCHURE01/22/2004 02:12 AM Here's a first draft of content for the bifold brochure for Meeting of Minds, one of my two new
businesses.
Please excuse the formatting. Comments are welcome. I'll show you
the draft brochure for The Caring
Enterprise Coach later this month.
Welcome
to a meeting of minds
Meeting of Minds
is a collaborative, equal partnership of experienced independent
consultants,
technologists, innovators, learning experts and information
specialists. Our
partners each possess unique and specialized skills essential to the
delivery of our offerings. We have no hierarchy, no physical assets,
no
front or back office, no overhead, no bureaucracy, and no employees.
We
pool our intellectual assets – expertise, skills, experience,
networks,
and leading edge thinking, tools and technologies. We bring agility,
economy,
efficiency, reach and depth that no limited, hierarchical professional
services organization can match.
The products and
services of Meeting of Minds fall into three clusters:
A major challenge for
business in
the 21st century is improving the productivity and effectiveness of
increasingly specialized, mobile, business-critical, time-challenged
front line
workers, and at last realizing, as a result, a healthy return on the
business’ major investment in deployed information
technology.
The traditional model
of
‘knowledge
management’, where top-down, centrally managed, standardized
knowledge
bases, loadsets and ‘productivity suites’ are pushed,
cookie-cutter
style, to all your employees, have not worked. Nor have attempts to
‘capture’ internal best practices and know-how in massive,
central,
indexed
repositories.
The Meeting of Minds approach is
completely different, and is based on our members’ learnings from
failed knowledge management and one-size fits all IT deployment
programs worldwide.
In contrast to the
traditional model, our approach is personal and customized to the
needs
of each front-line worker. It extends the boundaries of your
organization by allowing everyone to tap into the personal internal
and
external networks of everyone -- to bring to bear, just-in-time, the
best
minds on the planet to solve your business problems, not just the
information that your employees happen to have written down in case it
was needed again.
Our four offerings in
this Cluster
are implementations of a new set of front-line focused technologies
called Social Networking Applications, voted 2003’s
“Technology of the
Year” by Business 2.0
magazine. They are:
Personal Content Management:
Simple, leading-edge tools and processes that allow individuals to
organize, manage, add to and share the knowledge that they have on
their desktop. These tools, customized and stripped down versions of
commercial 'weblogs', also allow this personal, organized collection
of
knowledge to be shared, simply and automatically, with others at the
individual's discretion, and likewise permit your front-line people to
browse and subscribe to the personal knowledge collection of others,
inside and outside the organization, reciprocally, worldwide. The PCM
tool therefore serves as the individual's proxy, e-filing cabinet, CV
and calling card.
Expertise Location:
Simple, boundaryless networking tools that allow individuals to find
world-class expertise inside or outside the organization to solve
large
and small business problems quickly and effectively. These tools,
customized versions of commercial social networking applications, can
tap into PCM knowledge and the assessments of others outside the
business to enrich and extend the search for expertise, automatically
collect and maintain a 'super address book' of expertise to provide
instant, multiple points of contact with identified experts, and can
even be used to contract to buy from or sell to those outside the
organization.
Simple Virtual Presence:
Simple, professional laptop based tools that provide one-click
multimedia access to anyone in each employee's 'super address book',
and virtual presence at any conference. Used in connection with a
rotatable laptop camera and headset, these tools simultaneously show a
view of the person you're talking to, the document or presentation
you're collaborating on, and any sidebar instant messaging
conversations you're participating in.
Personal Productivity Improvement:
Short, focused, pre-researched, one-on-one sessions with each of your
front line people that address the specific technology and information
challenges of each individual, configure their computer for optimal
personal use, provide useful leave-behind reminder tips ('cheat
sheets'), and identify and report back to management systemic
knowledge
and technology problems that are hampering employee effectiveness on a
wider scale. These sessions hone employees' problem-solving,
researching, analysis and communication, consultation, collaboration
and technology use skills in the context of what they do in their
individual roles, in ways that work for them.
Social
Networking Applications, properly designed and implemented, are as
easy
to use as a telephone, and function intuitively, allowing individuals
to do electronically and virtually what they now do physically, in an
analogous manner, without the need for substantial training.
These products and
services can be used to
innovate, reinvigorate, enhance, and improve the effectiveness and
value of your IT, Learning and Information/ Knowledge Management teams
and processes, and enhance the productivity of everyone in your
organization.
We work closely with
the
people at
both the top and front lines of your organization to achieve these
improvements. We do not reduce cost or the need for people in your
organization. Instead, we enable your existing staff to do
significantly more, in areas that are strategic, even critical to your
business’ success, and to do so more effectively.
Traditional,
Failed Approach
Meeting
of Minds Approach
Content
Management Strategy
Large,
centrally- managed repositories
Personal,
individually- managed repositories
Knowledge
Acquisition Strategy
Internal
employees contribute to central repositories
Individual
repositories are connected peer-to-peer
Knowledge
Deployment Strategy
Centrally-available
knowledge is promoted
Individual
repositories are 'published' and 'subscribed' to
Knowledge
Re-use Strategy
Search
repositories for previously contributed knowledge
Just-in-time
canvassing of 'community'
Boundaries
of Knowledge
Sourced
from and shared within the organization only
Sourced
from and shared anywhere (subject to security policy)
Critical
Connections
People
to (internal) knowledge
People
to (internal & external) people
Critical
Knowledge Tools
Intranet
search engine and internal community of practice 'spaces'
Standard
'loadsets' and productivity suites for all staff
Customized,
personalized tools for each person
Technology
Training Strategy
Standard
group training and computer-based instruction
Individual,
face-to-face productivity training
Solution cluster 2: INFRASTRUCTURE STRATEGY &
ORGANIZATION
Management today has a love-hate relationship with infrastructure. On
the one hand, it is the long term investment in technology,
intellectual capital, and learning that helps the people in the
business do what they do best, effectively, and provides enduring
competitive advantage to the company. On the other hand, much of this
investment is in areas that are not core competencies of the
organization, and it's difficult for management to measure and justify
its value, especially when today's mantra is to outsource everything
possible, especially in areas of fixed cost.
Meeting of Minds
can help you identify which technology, information, learning and
other
infrastructure strategies make sense for your business, and whether,
and how, to outsource. Our three offerings in this Cluster are:
Infrastructure Strategy Alignment:
We help you assess alternative infrastructure strategies, bringing to
bear competitive intelligence on which strategies have and haven't
worked for other companies in your industry. Then we show you which
alternative strategies are most closely aligned to your short and
longer term organization-wide business strategy, and help you find a
migration path that will give you the infrastructure you need, where
you need it, in both the near and long term.
Infrastructure Reorganization & Outsourcing:
We take a look at your overall infrastructure resources and
investment,
and the value they provide to your business. Then, drawing on leading
global practices in infrastructure organization and management, we
help
you determine whether, and how, reorganization of your infrastructure
groups and redeployment of intellectual resources can benefit
operational effectiveness. If outsourcing is a logical alternative, we
work with the existing staff to help them be part of the solution --
helping them set up new infrastructure specialty houses that can
improve their job satisfaction while transitioning them from an
employee to a supplier relationship with you.
Infrastructure Future State Visioning: At Meeting of Minds we
take a long view of business change. We know that sometimes what
provides short term pain creates long term pain, and that many
businesses are undone not by poor business management but by failure
to
anticipate and adapt to unexpected innovations and environmental
changes in the industry. We closely monitor what's happening at the
leading edge of intellectual capital development and management, and
how today's emerging infrastructure tools will transform the way
business is done tomorrow. Future State Visioning can provide you with
a dynamic scan of the horizons of your business and industry, and
allow
you to anticipate and capitalize on future trends, and stay on your
industry's leading edge.
SELF-ASSESSMENT QUESTIONNAIRE: KNOWLEDGE, TECHNOLOGY &
INNOVATION SCORECARD
Here are ten questions that will help you self-assess the current
state
of your knowledge, technology and innovation infrastructure and
processes. If you're not able to answer 'yes' to each of them, Meeting of Minds would be pleased
to help you get you there:
1. Are you aware of, and satisfied with, the return your business is
getting on its investment in information, technology and
learning?
2. Do you know what the prevailing 'information behaviour' of your
front-line people is -- how they use information, where they look for
it, what sources they trust, and how they learn?
3. Are your people able to effectively use the technology and
information that is available on their laptops/desktops -- can they
find what they need quickly, reliably and efficiently?
4. Do your people travel only when other effective means of
communication, meeting and collaboration are unavailable -- do they
even have these alternatives at their disposal and are they
comfortable
and effective using them?
5. Are you, and your senior IT and KM people, aware of the existence
of, and potential value of, Social Networking Applications, and why
Business 2.0 magazine called them 2003's Technology of the Year, and
why some people think Social Networking will be the successor to
Knowledge Management?
6. Do you know the pros and cons of central vs decentralized vs
outsourced models of infrastructure management -- technology,
knowledge
and learning -- and are you confident your company has it right?
7. Do you know how much of your revenue is coming from new and
innovative products vs. incremental and 'sequel' products, and is it
substantial enough to achieve your revenue goals even in the face of
new competitive price pressures?
8. Are your best and most creative people happy, fulfilled, charged up
about their jobs?
9. Do you really understand how the producer-customer relationship has
shifted in unprecedented and inexorable ways in the past decade, and
how your business should adapt or even reinvent itself around a new
relationship with customers?
10. Are you on top of the latest techniques in business management --
viral marketing, working capital outsourcing, scenario building -- and
are you using them effectively to help your business succeed?
Solution cluster 3: RE-ENERGIZING BUSINESS INNOVATION
In the early years of the 21st century the focus of business has been
on short-term productivity and cost management, and many businesses
have taken their eye off the ball of innovation, the longer-term
engine
of business success. At Meeting of
Minds
we're watching for you, tracking innovations, notably in some
unexpected industries and countries, that will transform business and
produce new products and services with unimagined benefits and render
today's products and services obsolete. Here are six of our offerings
in the Innovation Cluster:
The New Business Incubator:
Your most creative people are also likely your most entrepreneurial
and
least risk-averse. Taking a page from some of the world's most
innovative companies, we can help you set these people up in their own
new business incubator, and set them free to do what they do best.
We'll teach them the basics of entrepreneurial business management --
a
program we call Entrepreneurship 101 -- and work with you to set them
up in a separate autonomous business, where they set the rules, they
decide on priorities, they source and manage their own budget, they
take all the risks, and you are their #1 customer.
The Innovation Amplifier:
Drawing on our knowledge of how innovation succeeds in different
business environments, we can assess your existing innovation
processes
and your 'innovation culture', and help you introduce proven
techniques
and methods that will give you a better 'environmental scan' of
emerging trends and technologies that could have application in your
business, better connectivity with your most future-astute customers,
skill in 'thinking customers ahead' to assess the commercial value of
new ideas, an ability to 'fail early' to cut the costs of unsuccessful
innovation, and the competence to commercialize and implement
innovative products, services, processes and technologies
effectively.
Economic Scenario Builder:
Using a variety of financial forecasting and sensitivity models, the
Economic Scenario Builder can answer your 'what if' questions about
the
impact on your business of sudden changes in interest rates,
unemployment rates, currencies, tax rates, GDP growth rates, trade,
social and environmental laws and regulations.
The Customer Handshake:
The latest innovation in Customer Relationship Management is a very
old
idea: build your contract with customers on trust, transparency, and a
simple 'handshake' commitment to mutual satisfaction. The concept uses
simple-language agreements and tools that replace today's adversarial
relationship with customers with a collaborative, 'win-win'
relationship of respect and compromise.
Working Capital Monitor:
Inability to properly manage cash, receivables, payables and
inventories is the #1 cause of business failure. The Working Capital
Monitor is a tool for forecasting and optimizing levels of each of
these assets.
Viral Marketing Toolkit:
Capitalizing on the explosion of connectivity and information in
today's consumer society, and new knowledge of how ideas are
propagated
and catch hold, one person at a time, the Viral Marketing Toolkit
shows
you how to promote your products and services without coercive and
expensive advertising.
Sample credentials: dave pollard, founder
Each of the members of Meeting of
Minds
is an independent businessperson. When you decide to contract with us
to help your business succeed, we work with you to select the team of
Meeting of Mindsexperts best suited to the
particular project.
Each of our members has unique, deep and exceptional business skills
and experience. As an example, here are some of the credentials of Dave Pollard, the
partnership's founder:
Thirty years of
business experience
Ten years as
Chief Knowledge Officer of Ernst & Young in Canada, and as their
Global Director of Knowledge Innovation
Director of the Center
for Business Knowledge, the world's largest and most award-winning
centrally managed knowledge organization
Core Member of
Ernst & Young's Innovation Team and author of the firm's Idea eXchange innovation
database
Fifteen years
advising
entrepreneurial businesses on all aspects of business success --
financial and operations management, start-up, forms of business
organization, financing, acquisitions & divestitures, IPOs,
process
improvement, technology and general business advisory services
Author of many
published
articles, presentations, book chapters and speeches on social
networking, knowledge management, innovation, the virtual workplace,
and the future of business
Last winter
I
wrote
about the growth of Internet Radio, and many of you told me about your
favourite online music sources. As a result, I've started listening
quite regularly while I work, enough to have assembled a small list of
favourite stations and tools:
Favourite rock music station: Rock Chicks Radio
- 128kbps Stereo - All the great women of rock, and interactive: you
can get them to add your favourite singer & song to the rotating
playlist of about 300 songs, send 'dedications' that will come up
everytime your favourite song is played, and vote on songs and
increase
the amount of play they get.
Favourite African music station: Pan-African All-Stars Radio
- 64kbps Stereo - I love modern African music, especially West/Central
African soukous. This station plays a great variety from throughout
the
continent, and they have a very informative website as well.
Favourite Latin American music station: SalsaStream - 96kbps Stereo -
Readers know I'm taking Salsa dance lessons (coming very
slowly, by the way, but great fun). But I've loved Latin American
music
for years, and this site has great sound and lots of variety.
Favourite folk music station:Omzig Kicks Ass - 64kbps Mono - Scroll down the
list until you find 'Omzig'. As much as I like Hober Radio, this one's at least as good.
Great mix of old and modern folk.
Favourite eclectic mix music station: Radio Paradise
- 64kbps Mono - This station bills itself as an 'intelligent music'
station and plays a wide variety of consistently high-quality, often
little-know and rarely-heard music.
Favourite classical music station: InLiv
e Katharsis
- 128kbps Stereo - Scroll down the list until you find 'Katharsis'
(not
a 24-hour station so if you don't see it, it's off-air). This is a
tough choice, since there are some excellent alternatives from France,
Switzerland and Russia. But this station, surprisingly from South
Korea, has excellent sound and plays not only an excellent selection
of
music from Medieval to Contemporary Classical, but seems to pick the
best possible performances of each composition. When it's off-air I
listen to MagnaTune
all-indie-performers' Shoutcast Classical Radio station.
Most
unusual station: Radio
KanKan
- 24kbps Mono - The country of Guinée in West Africa is one of
the
least-known in the world, but a source of great music (including some
amazing electric/tribal instrument fusions). This station and its site
play a lot of music and also take a courageous stand against it's
government's corruption. Some fascinating local stories, that tell you
more about the people of this land, caught between the indigenous,
French colonial and Arabic cultures, than you'll ever get in a book.
They're also nuts about football (soccer). In French.
Favourite Internet Radio Directory/Player: ShoutCast with BOOMBox.
The BOOMBox player is free to download. Access to hundreds of Internet
Radio stations (including all of the above), which you can listen to
with one click (no need to go through the station's website). Very
comprehensive list of stations, and well-maintained. Uses ShoutCast as
its streaming system and works best with the sister WinAmp player
(which is also free online). Set up your own favourites list and then
browse through your favourites with one-click.. Identifies the
selection currently playing as you browse. Also one-click recording
capability. No annoying ads. I'll never go back to Netscape Radio or
Yahoo Radio. If you can't find what you're looking for in the BOOMBox
list, the ShoutCast page has more detailed listings and info on the
available stations, as well as popularity ratings and one-glance look
at what's now playing on all the stations on a particular genre.
Sure beats the hell out of ClearChannel. Check 'em out, tell me what
you think, and what your favourites are.
New Aggregator
New Aggregator01/09/2003 01:29 PM The horribly-named Beaver is a "FeedReader replacement" that is in the
early stages of development and "very feature incomplete." Not...
Yahoo is beta testing an RSS Aggregator that integrates into the
My Yahoo service, but their advertising of it has fallen flat.
Because I choose the contents of a My Yahoo page, I have a sense of
ownership of the page. Personalized pages tend to evoke that feeling.
So imagine my surprise when I open My Yahoo today and find that
there’s a new content module for RSS
added to the top of the page. I wasn’t sure whether to feel
excited or violated. It’s great that Yahoo is embracing RSS, but they messed with my page.
Nevertheless I tried testing it, but when trying to add feeds or
search for feeds, I received a message saying that I didn’t have
access. Curious to see if I’d get the same message if I tried
removing the module, I hit the remove button. Now it’s gone and
there doesn’t seem to be a way to add it back.
It might seem strange that I’m complaining that I can’t
get something back when I didn’t want it in the first place, but
it goes back to that sense of ownership. I know that content module
exists, but I can’t add it to my page.
Dean Aggregator01/23/2004 02:21 PM Mike Muegel, a Dean supporter, has put together a very cool little
tool that aggregates blogs related to the Dean campaign. It sits in
your system tray and pulls in entries from a whole bunch o' sites, and
lets you cycle through them one at a time. In my experience with it
over the past few weeks, it's been very well-behaved, updating itself
cleanly. Desktop Dean is free, of course. You could probably talk to
Mike about having him do a version for some other topic you or your
business cares about......
When the module appeared on my Yahoo and I complained about it, I
was informed by Yahoo employees that it was a bug that caused the
pre-beta module to show up on some My Yahoo pages. It wasn’t an
intentional marketing effort, but the buzz created by the snafu
didn’t hurt Yahoo’s cause.
The module isn’t yet available on the standard list of My
Yahoo modules. To add it you’ll need to go to add.my.yahoo.com/rss.
"mNews looks quite good but perhaps quite
high at $19.95- 'Sports, weather, politics, business, science, health,
technology... Latest world headlines were never so easy to access on
your Treo as they are now with mNews! With mNews you can download and
read latest news from numerous sources of your choice from around the
world right on your Treo. mNews is the RSS news reader for PalmOne
Treo 600 devices. RSS news feeds is an emerging channel for delivering
the news, blogs and corporate communication to the end users. All
major news and information providers support RSS format which mNews
can download and display.' " [PDA
24/7]
A competitor to Hand/RSS, but I
still think mobile
Bloglines is the way to go so that your feeds are synchronized
across multiple devices.
Sorry for the lack of posts, but everyone in my house has been
felled by colds, including me. I'm also trying to keep up with current
events, as are you I'm sure. Since CNN isn't providing free, live video
feeds, I'm in search of others, but Andy Rhinehart and the Spartanbarg Herald-Journal are
doing their part by providing an RSS feed of war-related
content from the Associated Press.
Bayesian Aggregator
Bayesian Aggregator12/02/2003 08:47 AM In a comment, Kevin Jordan writes: 348North News is a normal
aggregator in much of the way you think of it. However, it allows me
to identify keywords or themes that it puts together into phrases
— and then matches up the phrases with like articles. Like a
cross between Google News and Daypop (but that makes it sound much
more complex than it is). If you want to see an "interests" based
summary for me, check out the Phrase Index. I use fairly general
keywords so as not to miss out on the future items. I haven't tried...
The misperception is that NewsGator is only an Outlook plug-in.
While the most popular product from NewsGator is currently their
Outlook-based aggregator, what really turned us on when we dug into
NewsGator as a potential investment is NewsGator Online Services
(NGOS).
Greg Reinacker's vision is much broader than simply an RSS
aggregator - his goal is to provide RSS content on any device.
NewsGator currently provides clients for Outlook, the Web, POP email,
mobile devices (web-based and wap), and Microsoft Media Center (how
cool is it to get an RSS feed on your TV?).
He makes a good point — NewsGator has really extended past
Outlook. They started with that, and the Outlook plug-in is what
they're most well-known for, but I just wrapped up 30 days with Newsgator Online Services
(NOS), and I can tell you that they've deftly transcended the
aggregator.
While working with NOS, I got the...feeling, that news and
information was just out there, everywhere, and it was up to me how I
wanted to receive it. They have options to push information to about
any device, on any platform. I've never felt more saturated by news
in my life than during those 30 days.
Information was everywhere — so much so that I stopped
thinking in terms of this aggreagtor or that protocol. I was just
swimming in information, and the method in which I chose to receive it
was almost incidental. Petty, even.
Aggregator utf-16 tests06/03/2004 05:16 PM I've converted yesterday's utf-8 tests to utf-16 (technically
utf-16le,
complete with the approrpriate BOM). For those that want to play
along with RSS, there also are RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and RSS 2.0 + Atom
versions.
Aggregator i18n tests
Aggregator i18n tests06/02/2004 06:44 PM Here is a simple set of tests for verifying that an aggregator
properly
handles various combinations of international characters and character
references. The desired result is that the title of every entry
should be displayed as
Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn. This is not
meant to be comprehensive, in particular, it focuses only on one
encoding (utf-8, which is guaranteed to be supported by any conformant
XML parser), and doesn't do mode base64.
"Want a glimpse of tomorrow? Innovators Bill French and Harry Hayes
are SmartStream Alliance™ and have a product that's so compelling
that news executives of every sort will be scrambling to be first in
their market with it....
RSxStream is a sophisticated and ingenious software engine
that takes RSS, Atom, RDF, XML, any other sort of feed or data stream,
or any other content that lives on the Internet and makes it available
to the desktop via a contextual reader. End users are given a
state-of-the-art reader — capable of grabbing anything from live
TV to music to video-on-demand to simple RSS text feeds. If it's
available via the Internet (today), it can be routed through the
RSxStream engine. The end users have complete control of what sources
they choose, as they would with any other RSS reader. The difference
is those choices are drawn indirectly, through the RSxStream
software....
What's crucial to understand with this is that whoever provides the
reader to the public also owns the engine, and THAT is the business
end of RSS. It means advertising can be crafted into the design of the
reader and delivered based on the choices, habits and interests of the
end user. It's contextual advertising nirvana. This type of business
currently does not exist, but it's ideal for local media outlets. Why?
Because we're in the information distribution business, and getting
the reader onto the public's desktops is the key to its success.
Moreover, if the local media entities don't do it, somebody else will,
and they will take all those ad dollars with them." [DONATA Communications, via JD on MX]
I love the idea of providing the reader and even pre-populating it
with feeds relevant to the intended audience, but I hate the
idea of some company monetizing it. I'd much rather get a grant and
have libraries provide this information-centric software. We're in the
"information distribution" business, too, except we're interested in
people getting information without strings attached.
Aggregator Market Share
Aggregator Market Share03/23/2005 08:02 PM In reply to one of my Browser Market Share postings, Ian Brown wrote to point out that with
an increasing portion of the traffic going through newsreaders, it
might be interesting to do some breakdown on that. So I did.
[Updated with pointers & percentages.]...
PC Mag Says
Death to 802.11b (Almost) "PC Magazine rounds up several
802.11g routers, and says they're cheap enough, they're good enough:
802.11b no longer enjoys a large enough (or any) price differential
for quality Wi-Fi gateways that include WPA encryption support, PC Mag
says. So while you can still find 802.11b devices on the market, they
recommend new gear have 802.11g built in...." [Wi-Fi Networking
News] Lesson: Make sure you buy 802.11g for your
library.
Making
CD-R's Last "From Doug
Kaye I learned of an interesting
article on how long CD-R's will last and things you can do to
increase or decrease that time. I've always just popped down to
Staples and bought the cheapest disks I could find. For some of my
uses (the latest Suse distro, for example) that's fine. But this
article makes the point that if you're using the disk to archive
important material, you need to be more careful. The article contains
information on how to select good media and media that's appropriate
for the drive that you'll be recording on. This may be especially
important for organizations building large collections of CD-R's that
they need to keep to meet regulatory or other business requirements."
[Windley's Enterprise Computing
Weblog] Lesson: If your library is using CD-Rs for
backups, archiving, or preservation, pick the right ones!
BlogBridge aggregator hits 1.0
BlogBridge aggregator hits 1.004/12/2005 11:06 AM BlogBridge, the aggregator I've been using for a few months in beta,
has gone to 1.0. There are a few things to like about it, not least of
which is that it's a free, open source project done by someone I know
well and trust 100%, Pito Salas. Blogbridge is a client, but it stores
your info on a server so you can use it on multiple machines. It tries
to help you discover new weblogs by noting links in your feeds. You
can rate your feeds and this somehow magically gets fed into a
community rating system. (I'm not...
AvantGo is the Original Aggregator
AvantGo is the Original Aggregator02/26/2003 02:37 PM After seeing this story today about the Anatomy of a mobile device
user, a survey conducted by AvantGo, I realized...
Browser or Aggregator? Some numbers.02/10/2003 12:58 AM I got to wondering about browsers vs. aggregators coming to my blog.
I'm going to assume that anyone who hits
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/ is a browser and anyone who hits
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/index.rdf is an aggregator. It's simple
and I have the data for...
RSS: a
Shift, from What...to What?
"He also neatly sort of answers his own question - with greater
precision than I can ever muster - by saying: 'If I visit houses of
content, as I seem to do on the Web, that is very different than the
content as “visitor” to my house.'... What we’re seeing is the
creation of personalised information hypermarkets.... Over time, you
develop a rich cocktail of sources and you develop a new habit for
browsing information. Some things you look at hourly, some daily, and
some you deliberately save till Friday pm for a catch up. This is
light years away from sitting down at the table in the morning looking
at your paper, or even your paper’s website.”
RSS and
Blog Directories
"Inspired by The Media Drop's list of newspaper RSS feeds, I thought
I'd compile a list of RSS directories. Enjoy and spread the
link."
Newsmap as a Model for Smart Aggregation
"Information overload. It’s the next big issue in publishing, and
technology in general. The day you have 400 e-mails in your inbox, 900
new items in your RSS aggregator, and 8 Instant Messenger windows on
your screen will come. For some people, it’s already here.... The
key to our information gathering lives is all about smart aggregation.
The days of media companies deciding what’s on your 'front page' are
numbered. Within five years, I believe customizable newsreader
technology (whether client-side like Net News Wire, or server-side
like Bloglines), will be as prevalent as the web is right
now."
500 down, 3061 to go
"At the beginning of this week I had 310 feeds showing around 25,000
unread posts. I had toyed with the idea of declaring RSS bankruptcy
and just starting again, but I was getting increasingly unhappy with
chaotic state of my feeds and deep down I knew that hitting 'mark all
posts read' would do nothing to solve the problem in the long
run."
Book Review Aggregator
Book Review Aggregator01/03/2005 07:33 PM Metacritic Books.
Metacritic has been covering reviews for movies, music, and games for
years, but now has started aggregating books reviews, with about 150
books so far.
... is like watching The Matrix on a Teletype machine/printer:
you not only miss the entire experience, but most of the headlines
picked up by the feed are uninteresting at quick glance, whereas the
stories themselves usually are pretty good. Sure, better summary
style might do the trick, as Jon Udell often writes
about, but that would miss the point, and the impact/speed with which
worthy items appear. I used to moan about the confusing (non-existing
or subtle) quoting convention, but now I've told him that I don't care
anymore... where would we be if Marc Canter gave up his
shoot-from-the-hip style, and increasingly-rich-media blog pages?
Last winter
I
wrote
about the growth of Internet Radio, and many of you told me about your
favourite online music sources. As a result, I've started listening
quite regularly while I work, enough to have assembled a small list of
favourite stations and tools:
ANT is a coolio video blogging
aggregator I saw previewed in NYC at Vloggercon a couple of weeks
ago.
It's now ready for folks to beat on.
