w.bloggar is one of the the best xml-rpc weblog clients I have seen.
…posted with w.bloggar

I’ve always thought that the disclaimer:

“the personal opinions expressed here are mine not my employers” was tautological.

For a weblog, this equates to:

“the personal opinions on this personal opinion site are personal opinions not someone else’s opinions”.

I may add that to my sidebar.

Although more accurately it should read:

“the personal opinions on this personal opinions site are rarely my personal opinion but more usually the result of a deeply immature desire to disagree with anything anyone says”

Meg elaborates:

A personal opinion - megnut.com

I have three types of possession: useful; sentimental/decorative (perhaps was useful) and might be useful or needed in the future.

Items in the last category really, really bug me. A large proportion of the might be useful stuff could easily be online. Take for example product manuals or bank statements (my bank will only allow access going back a limited time).

Today I threw out a shed load of product manuals for the various bits of near obsolete technology that I am continually acquiring - cos if I want to find out how to troubleshoot the thing gathering dust in the corner I can look it up on the web.

Google is increasingly my virtual repository of ‘might be useful’.

Amen

Info on Longhorn, Microsoft’s planned file system:

Longhorn will finally allow you to search a single Windows machine with similar ease to the way you can already simultaneously search hundreds of thousands of other computers, via a web search.

But, as Danny Ayers points out on RSS-dev, Longhorn is based on a relational file system, something which is perhaps obsolete for the purpose. An XML or even better, a graph based model would be more suitable.

“Perhaps a little unimaginative of them to use a relational store (a graph model would be a better match for the networked computer environment IMHO), but I suppose they’ve already got the code. I guess at least it will mean that “Find File” will take days rather than months…”

This is huge- ok, perhaps overstating, but remember, search ads are a 1.5 billion dollar business and the following extends Google in the general ad space alongside companies like DoubleClick. The first signs of what the Google/Blogger combination will yield are shown with Google’s latest Adwords initiative.

Google has just launched adverts which are based upon the content of a web page, for an example see the old Industry Standard website.

This is a major new direction for Google since it extends their main revenue source from adverts on their own and affiliated search sites to any website. It also marks a trend away from the banner ad - in fact web advertising will increasingly consist of targeted text advertising and rich media adverts.

The key to the targeted ads is that they change according to the content of the page (Google continually spiders the pages and serves different ads based upon what it has spidered and indexed), in other words they are perfect for sites with dynamic content - and this is where weblogs come in.

If you look at the adverts on Blogspot you will see that as of now, they are also based upon the content of the page. Because Google owns Blogger, they can index the pages in real time and thus target ads immediately there is a new posting.

Three things are missing to make this a killer app:

1. The ads should be targeted at the level of the posting as opposed to the page, then they could be served inline even when syndicated via RSS aggregators.

2. As Dave Winer has suggested, Google should look at pings to weblogs.com to allow real-time targeted ads for users of other tools such as Userland and Moveable Type.

3. The Google indexing engine needs to detect tone in the context of a keyword mention. For example neither the advertiser nor the Blogger would want adverts for SUV’s appearing on an environmental site that has a posting against gas guzzling cars.

Jeff is disappointed that the THINK proposal did not win the WTC competition.

Although innovative, there are two reasons why I believe the decision may be sound:

1. the project was very ambitious structurally and could have suffered dramatically from the effects of watering down the initial idea on grounds of cost and practicality.

2. THINK is a collaboration and could have suffered the perils of committee design. A great monument needs a great artist, a single minded signature designer with the resoluteness of a Frank Lloyd Wright.

Libeskind has won and although his scheme looks more conventional at first glance, his past record will stand testament that this will be a fittingly triumphant project unlike anything else in Manhattan today. This will include the first deconstructionist skyscraper.

Don Park complains that metadata is being stuffed into the description tag. This was the original reason that a modular approach to RSS was necessary.

What is needed is a simple, online, forms-based tool to create RSS modules. I guess I should have a go.

More details of Namex which allows high precision, fuzzy search for people by name.

About NameX

I know that Dave probably won’t agree with me but now that the big guys are interested in weblogs, weblog software need patents. Search software has long been a patent rich environment, Google has them a plenty and one of the reasons why Overture bought AltaVista was because of their patents.

Weblog software is elegantly simple and depends on innovation that is easily copyable by the bigger companies. All the more need to protect and continue to foster this innovation.

Although patents are often seen to be an anathema to the collaborative world of the developer community, they do offer protection for smaller companies. Perhaps a compromise would be a patent system analogous to the Creative Commons approach to copyright which protects against exploitation whilst preserving the developer community ethos. In other words patents which are not infringed if they are used within open source or non-profit development.

Johnathon Freedland quotes Robert Kagan in the Guardian.

“Europeans have grown soft and idealistic (and feminine) while the Yanks remain tough, booted and aware (like real men) of how brutal a place the world can be.”

I instinctively like American no-bullshit attitudes, but Bush is hardly tough, he’s a little rich kid. Come on, look at the government of thugs that Sharon is putting together and the Bush administration is too timid to say anything, an insult to moderate Israelis.

“Right-wing firebrand Tzahi Hanegbi was named internal security minister. In 1980, Hanegbi received a six-month suspended sentence for leading a chain-wielding attack on Arab students at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, where he was student union chairman. Hanegbi has since expressed regret.”

Guardian Unlimited | World Latest | Israel Forms Hard-Line Government