I’m not a fan of roller coaster rides, so this is almost comforting compared to California, Florida, or Arizona.

Thanks to Mark Perry for the pointer.

John and Dan were talking about email.

I feel the same way about email clients as I do about feed readers - they’re water.

And by water, I mean money.

By money, I mean: my wallet is open for something better than Mail.app.

Elsewhere:

“Email is built on a set of standards, and is implemented by a number of different servers, clients, etc. All this makes innovation in the email space move at a glacial pace.” - Jason @ Babelnote

1. I’m calling web browsers the exception that proves the rule. For some reason, there are plenty of desktop options for web browsers, each fairly distinct and interesting from the other. Throughout the day, I regularly alternate between Safari and Camino while usually touching Internet Explorer and Firefox every other day.

“the more time I spend w/ FriendFeed, the less I like it. I’d rather read y’all through my own blog.”

If services like Friendfeed, Twitter, etc, have an innovation, it’s in present reading and publishing in the save view. This single view - often described as ‘presence’ or ’social-ness’ - makes it easy to write a comment or publish a new idea quickly.

The 2…3…4? blogs I maintain is where I feel the most comfortable exploring and archiving ideas¹. Yet the one (apparently killer) feature the popular weblog tools lack is this combined view. I’m thinking of the ability to easily initiate a reply on one weblog/service that can be read in its entirety on another weblog/service - without a click.

Separate places distracts and dilutes.

“By keeping me posting small thoughts all day long, I have less urgency to capture those thoughts in longer, more fleshed out blog posts. It eats away at my time, the continual partial attention it requires saps cycles from my brain’s CPU and in the end what do I have?” - Dave Slusher

Now, imagine loading up feeds into a WordPress install and reading them the same way you read things within FriendFeed or Twitter or WhatHaveYou2.0. The writing process would remain the same, and when a post is published - it’s sent to all the other sites/services that are subscribed to the feed.

Weblogs today aren’t far off. The difference is immediacy and a read/write combined presentation. There’s nothing requiring a weblog post to; be larger or smaller than some arbitrary number of characters, have comments, categorization, or any number of other things that separate it from ‘microblogging’ tools.

Perhaps you feel more comfortable publishing through Twitter or YouTube or Utterz than a weblog proper. This difference should be as meaningless as our respective carriers when we’re chatting on the phone.

1. This post originally started as a comment on FriendFeed, but the lack of paragraphing and a few other annoyances sent me here.

It’s a good question, cutting to the core of my ambivalence over the religious wars between RSS, Atom, etc.

The flavor of XML a feed is published in shouldn’t matter.

Neither to the publisher nor the receiver.

Any parser able to handle multiple flavors should be able to parse all flavors equally fast. Some parsing engines are built for one flavor of XML or another - rather than abstracted to parse XML in general. Then again, it’s trivial to spit out one XML format as another, so, maybe format is a conversation between the user agent and the server.

Eh. (Get a smarter parser, jeeez.)

From my studying of both RSS and Atom, comparing them is like comparing the UIs of Windows and Macintosh. They do feel different. One puts window buttons over here, one puts them over there. One is this color, one is that color. One prefers the Control key, the other prefers the Command key. Some people prefer this one, others prefer that one. One says ‘potahtoe’. One, ‘potaytoe’.

From my I understanding, Atom was developed due to perceived deficiencies and ambiguity in the RSS 2.0 spec. Perhaps RSS 2.0 is guilty of being open to interpretation. I don’t know. I’ve found it to have logical places for everything I want to publish. Same for Atom.

Last I checked, Cullect was parsing somewhere north of 8100 feeds. Cullect doesn’t and shouldn’t care if a feed is Atom or RSS or RDF or filled with crazy namespaces. Cullect has 2 jobs when it comes to feeds; parse XML tags in a smart way, publish out useful feeds in whatever flavor the user agent requests.

The biggest issue I’ve found in parsing thousands of XML feeds is badly published XML. Feeds using the tags in bizarre ways. Feeds just not conforming to any spec. Feeds published in a way that just makes parsing hard.

Both RSS and Atom publishers are equally guilty. My Wacky-Feeds-That-Won’t-Parse list of contains just as many RSS feeds as Atom feeds.

A year ago, I wrote up my thoughts on publishing RSS 2.0 for easy publishing.

Here’s the recording of the full event:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/563535

2 Comments

• At 16 July 2008 (4 weeks ago), Nicole Netland wrote:

  Wish I could have seen the presentation in person. Bummed to miss it.

• At 17 July 2008 (3 weeks ago), Social Information Hoarder: MIMA’s Data Overload Panel and Helpful Links wrote:

  [...] My day job is all about trends, research and buzz and using that to inform client campaign strategy. Here at Perfect Porridge, my job is to know what bands are hot, not and up and coming. In my personal life, I need to be sure I’m up to speed with what my family’s doing, how the economy affects my mortgage, if the car has gas, etc. etc. This is lots of information coming to me in lots of ways — drinking from the firehouse, as Garrick says. [...]

mysqldump -v -uUSER -pPASSWORD --opt --compress DATABASE_NAME | ssh REMOTE_SERVER_USER@REMOTE_HOSTNAME mysql -uREMOTE-MYSQL-USER -pREMOTE_MYSQL_PASSWORD REMOTE_DATABASE_NAME

1. Backing up is a good thing. Why aren’t you doing it? Here’s a script for that.
mysqldump -h HOSTNAME DATABASE_NAME | gzip -9 > BACKUP_DIR/DATABASE_NAME.sql.gz

1 Comments

• At 16 July 2008 (4 weeks ago), wdbp wrote:

  I'd said more : don't use password on command line or erase history after...


content = "some text with a <a href='/path/to/relative_link/'>relative link</a>"
link = "http://somedomain.com/"
content.gsub(/=('|")\//, '=\1*/').gsub(/\*\//, link.match(/(http|https):\/\/[\w.]+\//)[0])

The asterisk ‘*’ is a hackey placeholder for the actual link swapped in with the second gsub. If you know of a way to pass in the link without needing the placeholder, awesome - paste it in the comments. Thanks.

1 Comments

• At 25 July 2008 (2 weeks ago), vague wrote:

  You could use either blocks or string interpolation to get rid of the hacky * thing.

  With Interpolation:

  content.gsub(/=('|")\//, "=\\1#{link.match(/(http|https):\/\/[\w.]+\//)[0]}./")

  With a block:

  content.gsub(/=('|")\//) {|m| "=#$1%s/" % link.match(/(http|https):\/\/[\w.]+\//)[0]}

“…we are going smaller, we are going less.” - Bodo von Hodenberg, bookseller - Bildschöne Bücher, Berlin Germany

BTW - I found this link on my economics reading list in Cullect which proves (at least to me) that good curation is about both depth and discovery.

Here’s the bit of my interview they used on-air and online.

“Garrick Van Buren is a social media consultant. He says YouTube is useful only as a place to upload videos. It isn’t likely the best destination site for marketers, because videos are lost easily in the heap.”

“‘Figure out where the people that you are trying to reach are. Are they at Facebook? Then create a Facebook app. Find those people that are most likely to spread your message,’” Van Buren said.”

As part of that effort, I’ve started a Google Map for listing and pin-pointing these places. There’s also a handful of invites floating around to for those that want to help.

Want one?

View Larger Map

Update 07 July 2008
I just cracked open a PBWiki for this project: http://twincities-coffee-wifi.pbwiki.com/

10 Comments

• At 26 June 2008, Jon Gordon wrote:

  Thanks for setting this up. I'm thinking each review should include a nice photo or two, and include evaluations of coffee quality, wi-fi experience, and general ambience. Interview with owner or customers would be a nice bonus. Sound good?

• At 26 June 2008, Garrick Van Buren wrote:

  Yes Jon, I think that sounds great. As you've seen, Google Maps will support some of that - but it doesn't make sense for all of it. I liked the longer-form model Dwight Silverman in Houston is doing.

  Perhaps the Google Map lists the places, and there's another place for the in-depth stuff with the two linked together.

• At 26 June 2008, Mykl Roventine wrote:

  This a great idea. Thanks for getting the ball rolling!

• At 26 June 2008, Ivan Stegic wrote:

  Great idea, thanks for starting this up. Wondering if a place like Turtle Bread, that really isn't just a coffee shop, qualifies? Probably does. Looking forward to this.

• At 26 June 2008, Jon Gordon wrote:

  Yes, I was thinking the same thing - we need a prettier way to display. But the map can also be a complete deal, cuz it can display photos and lots of text, right? Anything we post to a blog or wiki can by copied and pasted into the map, if we so choose. I think.

• At 26 June 2008, Jon Gordon wrote:

  Ivan: Frankly, I'm interested in places that are mostly about coffee. Not sure Turtle Bread qualifies. Never been there. You can review anything you want, but I'll stick to the hardcore coffee joints myself. And since I won't have a car during my stay, it'll be hardcore coffee joints that are convenient to major bus lines. And probably, those mostly east of the mighty Miss...

• At 26 June 2008, Darrel wrote:

  East Side Saint Paul no represented!

  Now let's make one pointing out the good Iced Coffee options around town (really, why is it so hard to find a good iced coffee?)

• At 26 June 2008, Jeremy Raths wrote:

  What fun. I would love to help out. I am crazy about espresso. And of course Clover, press pots.

  Any real special presentations. But hold the milk.

  J

• At 26 June 2008, Jon Gordon wrote:

  Jeremy, are you from the same The Roastery that I used to go to back in the early to mid 90s - on Cleveland Avenue? I've yet to taste better coffee on a regular basis that the press pots I used to get there. San Francisco has been somewhat of a disappointment (but it's getting better with Blue Bottle and Ritual Roasters that I just discovered). Also, I feel ya on the 'hold the milk' but I still like me some dry cappuccino...

• At 27 June 2008, Jeremy Raths wrote:

  Jon,

  It is I. The very same. Thanks for the kind words.

  I guess I could take a dry cappucino. But I have not seen one of those in a few years. Nowadays everything looks like a latte. I will check out Anodyne on Nicollet and 43rd. Nice place, wifi. Decent coffee.

  I heard good things about Blue Bottle and Rituals.

  Say hi to Ryan at Rituals for me.

  Jeremy