The BBC outlines a project to create a website with photos from 16,146 confluences of latitude and longitude in order to create a unique picture of the world. To do: Afghanistan (64) Bangladesh (15) Bolivia (93) DR Congo (189) Ecuador (32) Kyrgyzstan (18) Libya (155) Madagascar (60) Paraguay (35) Reunion (7) Seychelles (4) Svalbard (71) Turkmenistan (53) Yemen (48)
BBC Radio 3 looks at a variety of architectural subjects for the remainder of the year. Check out the archive links for interviews with Rem Koolhaas, Renzo Piano and Daniel Libeskind. BBC – Radio 3 – Architecture on 3 homepage
“The mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only two cities in the world to have suffered atomic bombings, blasted Russia on Friday over its plan to consider restricted use of nuclear weapons to deal with regional conflicts and international terrorism” Japan Today-Hiroshima, Nagasaki mayors protest Russia nuke plan
I don’t think I’ve been at a conference lately where someone hasn’t mentioned the words ‘Dave Winer’ within 10 minutes. Even those who may not always agree with Dave have to admit that he is one of the prime connectors in the tech. world, and therefore organizing a conference is something that he is a natural for. I can’t make it to BloggerCon, but I’m sure it will be a success and that as a result there will be others. Blogger Con: Blogroll for BloggerCon
Dive into mark: f8dy categories are so easy to to badly f8dy to do f8dy and so hard to do well jcgregorio yup My categories on the right suck: 1. they don’t match other people’s so they don’t really offer anything that a search on Google doesn’t – categories that aren’t standardized are useless. 2. nobody looks at them So I’m thinking of: using less categories and ones that map to something else; branding the categories so that they look like specialist weblogs.
Libby Miller has an excellent piece on strategies for combining foaf and geo with RDFical. Plan B: Combining foaf, RDFical and geo, and maybe RSS 1.0…
How was this photo fo a someone holding a nuclear fuel rod taken? 1. tiny, very brave photographer sitting inside containment chamber? 2. vanity mirror on other side of containment chamber? 3. deluxe double aspect containment chamber with windows on both sides? 4. fake containment chamber for publicity shots?
Doc Searls reverses the idea of taking print journals and doing them as weblogs. Amazon has done pretty well out of using the web to shift a rain forest of dead trees, maybe there’s something in this. “I’m predicting that within a year there will be print journals that start on the Web, harnessing blog energy, putting the blog posting, vetting & editing process to work, and running it through to publication with ink on paper.” Jeff Jarvis loves The Week, the readers digest of newspers. I’d probably subscribe to a weekly roundup of the best of Weblogs in print format.
0xDECAFBAD has a very nice example of RSS 2.0 and RSS-Data alongside. If you use schemas with RSS, you get eveything that RSS-Data provides and more to the point, you make the data structure definitions optional. The only downside as far as I can see is that with RSS-Data the structural definitions are inline. Surely, however, since schemas are in XML themselves they can be inline – rather like CSS being inline or referenced?
Jeremy Allaire is having some interesting ideas about RSS. I like his idea of RSS-Data, but isn’t the idea of a generic aggregator separate? Rich metadata in RSS isn’t happening at the moment, the spec is there but the tools to create and read the content aren’t: 1. there are no end user tools to create modules (why not allow people to build their own forms, where each form field is an RSS tag in a namespace that is their email address by defaut?) 2. there are no aggregators that read extended metadata (there are no aggregators that filter by a MoveableType category, for example). Both these issues are as much to do with UI as data modelling. RSS module builders could use a web forms that build forms approach, (the ‘metacrap’ syndrome would be a problem but there are hundreds of person-years work that have already gone into this…
Current RSS readers are more or less similar, differentiated on interface features rather than core functionality, and sold, where applicable as software tools. Over time these features will surely be a commodity and any business model around RSS aggregation will be based upon the value add on top of aggregation. My guess is that this value-add is in efficient searching, categorizing and personalizing rather than discovery and display. Categorization and personalization can be done by adding metadata to existing feeds (the tokenization process of search could arguably be considered metadata a tokenized content tag would allow local searching). This can be entirely independent of the tool used to view RSS, providing that RSS readers can read this metadata. The time is probably about right to start looking at this from the various initiatives such as FOAF and RSS topics that are out there and building features based upon them into…
Nick Bradbury’sFeedDemon is very nice. The 3 pane interface is clearly the way to go for RSS reading. What’s really interesting about FeedDemon however, is that it is basically an RSS enhanced browser rather than a separate app. admittedly the distinction is blurred, but seeing FeedDemon does lead me to believe that RSS features could become standard, collapsible components of a browser. When the joint Moreover/Blogger tool Newsblogger launched, it had a similar 3 pane view, but was definitely an online app. Blogger then decided to make it function through an Explorer bar in IE, which is more similar to the path that FeedDemon is going down. There are four types of aggregator: online (Bloglines); separate app (Newzcrawler, Newsmonster, Amphetadesk; Netnewswire); enhanced browser (FeedDemon); and enhanced email app (Newsgator). Until now, I was convinced that the online approach was best, but I’m not so sure.