I can scan 200 blogs in my RSS reader in 20 minutes. They get indexed so I can find them later. I can understand why I might – might – want to listen to a podcast on my portable media player at the gym. But to use this as a way of sharing information? There aren’t enough hours in the day to listen to two podcasts, let alone 200.
Category: Web sites
A is for Arrogant, B is for Bloggers, D is for Dell
Jeff Jarvis had a problem with his Dell computer. Dell’s customer service did a terrible job of responding to him. He documented the whole affair here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. (I may have missed one or more installments in the saga, and no doubt there will be more to come.) The latest coda is contained in a letter that Jeff wrote to a VP at Dell:
This machine is a lemon. Your at-home and complete care service is a fraud. Your customer service is appalling. Your product is dreadful. Your brand is mud.
Good for Jeff. He had a horrible experience with Dell’s customer service operation, like so many others, and he decided to document it in a very public place. But I’m not writing today to trash Dell. Instead, I’m writing to express my disgust with the response that Jeff’s series of rants got from other people who have high-traffic Web sites that are run by popular content-management systems (blogs, I think they’re called). These folks seem to think that because Jeff is semi-famous and gets quoted a lot on other Web sites and occasionally has his face on TV to talk about these blog things, he’s entitled to special treatment.
Continue reading “A is for Arrogant, B is for Bloggers, D is for Dell”
More details about RSS in Longhorn
Microsoft has a new home page for RSS in Longhorn. Here’s a reasonably simplified explanation of RSS Support in Longhorn. The specification itself is here.
This license information appears at the bottom of the specification page:
Microsoft’s copyrights in this specification are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (version 2.5). To view a copy of this license, please visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/. As to software implementations, Microsoft is not aware of any patent claims it owns or controls that would be necessarily infringed by a software implementation that conforms to the specification’s extensions. If Microsoft later becomes aware of any such necessary patent claims, Microsoft also agrees to offer a royalty-free patent license on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and conditions to any such patent claims for the purpose of publishing and consuming the extensions set out in the specification.
Dean Hachamovich has some comments here.
Oh, and those who were wondering whether XML support in Office 12 will be a big deal can now put their skepticism to rest. Yes, this will have huge implications for Office 12, and I think you can safely assume that the ability to create and consume RSS will be a big part of the next version of Office.
Dear Google, where’s the scale?
Does anyone else find it odd that Google Maps and satellite images, while undeniably cool, are completely lacking any indication of scale?
I’ve been using the service a lot lately and have been very frustrated at the inability to calculate how far things are from each other on the map. There’s nothing on the Help page, either. A map without a scale is just a little bit broken.
More on Microsoft and RSS
Joe Wilcox at Microsoft Monitor has a series of three posts on Microsoft’s RSS Platform. (Part 2 is here and Part 3 is here.) They’re well worth reading, with some interesting insights and a nice historical overview. It’s too bad the first post in the series starts with a big mistake:
Microsoft will introduce proprietary tags to RSS, which it will make available under a Creative Commons license.
Proprietary means the format is owned by one company, and if anyone wants to use it they have to pay a royalty, or reverse-engineer it, or reinvent the wheel. These extensions are being released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, whose terms read:
You are free:
- to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
- to make derivative works
- to make commercial use of the work
The extensions Microsoft announced today are not “proprietary.” Exactly the opposite, in fact.
Wow! Microsoft releases new RSS standards under a Creative Commons license
I’m listening to the live stream of Dean Hachamovitch’s keynote at Gnomedex, where Larry Lessig just gave a public thank you to Microsoft for its decision to make its new list extension to the RSS standard available under a Creative Commons license. For those who don’t remember, Lessig was the special master appointed by Judge Jackson in the Microsoft antitrust trial. For him to give a shout-out to the folks in Redmond is a very big deal.
The press release has some details:
Microsoft Corp. today announced support for RSS (Really Simple Syndication) in the next version of the Microsoft® Windows® operating system, code-named “Longhorn.” The RSS functionality in “Longhorn” is being designed to make it simple for end users to discover, view and subscribe to RSS feeds, as well as make it easier for developers to incorporate the rich capabilities of RSS into their applications. In addition, Microsoft announced Simple List Extensions, a set of extensions to RSS that can be used to enable Web sites to publish lists such as of photo albums, music playlists and top 10 lists as RSS feeds. Microsoft is making the specification freely available via the Creative Commons license, the same license under which the RSS 2.0 specification was released. …
The RSS support in the “Longhorn” platform includes the following:
- Common RSS Feed List. This core feature of Windows maintains a common list of the user’s subscriptions across all applications. This allows the user to subscribe to a feed once and have all RSS-enabled applications able to access the common list to view the subscriptions.
- Common RSS Data Store. A common data store will provide a single location where applications can access content that has been downloaded to the PC via RSS, including text, pictures, audio, calendar events, documents and just about anything else. All applications will have access to this content for creating rich user experiences.
- RSS Platform Sync Engine. The sync engine will automatically download data and enclosures for use by any application. The engine is designed for efficiency, using idle network bandwidth whenever possible to limit the effect on the user’s Internet experience. Developers can use the platform to get RSS data without having to manage details such as synchronization schedules or subscriptions.
What does all this mean? The unexciting opportunity is for publishers to deliver more Top 10 lists that can be updated regularly in an RSS-enabled client. The more exciting opportunity is that you can build your own list – your favorite restaurants, photos, performers, writers, technology analysts. Using RSS, you can have those lists updated automatically and share them with other people.
Exciting.
Channel 9 video with first public demo of IE7 is here.
It’s funny because it might be true
The Onion has published its 300th anniversary special edition. Want to know what’s going to be in the news in 2056? Check it out. Hilarious, as in “The guy in the next cubicle will want to know what’s so funny and you won’t be able to tell him.” Rich with detail, too. Be sure to follow the links. Apparently, 50 years from now, iPods will be allowed to vote, Abraham Lincoln’s DNA will be for sale over the counter, a fat Britney Spears will be on postage stamps, and daytime TV will be worse than ever.
Thanks to NewMexiKen for the pointer.
Another comment spam update
Last March I provided a progress report on the effectiveness of MT-Blacklist, an add-in to the Movable Type software that runs this blog. In the first 75 days after I installed it, it blocked just under 10,000 comment and trackback spams. In the 105 days since that report, spammers have gotten more persistent but haven’t succeeded in breaking through.
Since March 1, MT-Blacklist has blocked 267 spam attempts a day, more than 95% of them automatically. That’s up from 146 per day in the first quarter. The higher number is probably attributable to the increased popularity of this site. Still, as I said in March, I honestly don’t know what I would do without this add-in. And I’m also not sure what I would do if I ever met a comment spammer face to face.
Anyone know how to make your own tiny/short URLs?
One of the most frustrating aspects of writing a computer book is providing pointers to useful information on the Web. We have a lot of URLs in this book, and most are long and random – expecting the reader to type in one of these URLs from the printed edition isn’t all that realistic.
Not only that, but URLs decay over time. I’m in the final stages of updating Windows Security Inside Out (delayed a few months from the original publication date and now scheduled for release in September/October). Many of the Web pages we pointed to in 2002, when we wrote the first edition of this book, have changed. A few Webmasters provide redirects, but most don’t.
One possible solution for this dilemma is to provide URLs that redirect to the actual page. Third-party sites like tinyurl.com and snipurl.com already do this. The advantage is that those long, impossible-to-type addresses get cut down to manageable size.
I’d like to do something similar, but without having to rely on a third party. My vision is a Web page where I can maintain a simple database consisting of a page name, description, original URL, and short URL (the short URL would be a simple four- or five-character code, which would be tacked on to the end of my domain name). I would create this list as I work on a book, so that the URLs published in the book would point to the short URL and redirect to the proper page.
If a page gets moved, I can change the redirect code so that it points to the new location. If a page disappears, I can point to a cached copy of the original or to an alternate source that contains the same information. I can publish the master list of resources on a page that’s available to anyone.
Anyone know of an off-the-shelf package that does something like this? If not, any suggestions on the best way to build this kind of application? Leave a comment or send me an e-mail.
Comments and conversations
Mark Cuban talks with CNN:
One of the great things, and the key, really, I think, to a successful blog is that you have to be brutally honest. You can’t do CEO speak, you can’t do annual reports speak, because people in the blogosphere and your readers are just going to see right through it. … And particularly if you have a blog that allows comments. Because if you allow comments, and you’re just talking nonsense or just talking around a subject, you’re just going to get ripped to pieces in the comments. And it will act as a magnet for people who aren’t going to help your product or aren’t going to help your cause at all. So you have to be very careful. …
I’ll tell you one other thing that’s really critical in a blog that I have really learned from in my blog, the user comments. If you — when you come out and say something in a regular media, there’s not really an interactive discussion about what you have just discussed or talked about. On a blog, if I write something, whether it’s about business, whether it’s about the Mavericks, whether it’s about technology, one of the cool things is I know out of all of those hundreds of thousands of readers someone might disagree with me and really might have a better perspective on the topic than I do.
Exactly. Which is why I really, really welcome comments here. Even when a commenter disagrees with what I’ve written. Especially when they disagree.
Ed Bott 