Category: General

Almost 2 months after watching 10mph via Netflix and reviewing it, I receive an invitation to the Mpls screening on Aug 15.

Kudos to Hunter and Josh for keeping the buzz going on their film.

“…I can tell fairly accurately, based on Ebert’s opinion and Roeper’s counterpoint or agreement, whether I will like a movie or not.” – J Wynia

“This is about me inviting you to follow me while I pursue a goal.” – Tim Coyne

Struck me as one of the nicest things to offer.

• ….email apps didn’t consider reading and writing separate modes?
• …you could post to your blog, from mine?
• …your online profile was filled out by your friends?
• …Popularity was measured by the size of the group of people that are everywhere you are.
• …only robots exchanged messages on Twitter.
• …I stopped getting distracted by hypotheticals?

UPDATE 19 May 2011

“How can you tell if the person at the other end is real or a kid in Guatemala or Malaysia being paid by the message to engage with people to help build cred for some spam-issuing Twitter account?” – Dave Winer

If disaster strikes which one do you bet on for getting back up and usable faster?

Inspired by:

“Oftentimes, many of us immersed in Bay Area tech look straight for the shiny solutions, regardless of how ineffective they might be when the infrastructure collapses” – Eric Rice

As much as I like Kris, I disagree with his How to save your unconference post.

It’s #2 that gives it away:

“Awesome hallway conversations”

If you’re having awesome hallway conversations, it’s not an unconference. It’s a regular conference. Sorry.

A good unconference has the awesome conversations within the sessions. Otherwise – why bother with the sessions? Maybe you enjoy sitting quietly while being pitched to?

If the goal of the event is to be a conference – then absolutely take Kris’ advice. Be a conference; plan the hell out of it, have tracks, boring lecture/presentations, and tasteless box lunches. Sounds like a waste of time for everyone.

I had a brief conversation this morning about future-proofing websites.

What persists centuries?

Not commercial endeavors. Religious ones.

I’m parsing more and more RSS feeds and I’m seeing some very basic problems. While the feeds are valid, they’re obfuscated. Harder to parse – not by poor tag usage – but by misusing the content within the tags.

Here’s a quick run down of the tags as documented in the RSS 2.0 Spec and my interpretation of them.

Item Tags
One or both of the following are required by the spec:
title, description
I’m fine with encoded HTML. I’m fine with using the first 50 characters or so as a title if you’d rather not use title (it is overrated). I’m not cool with having author or pubDate info in either of these tags. Just makes it harder to parse.

and then any of these. I consider the first 4 required:

author
A special place for the author. Author info doesn’t belong in the link, description, or title – it belongs here. If there’s author info, the author tag should be used. (Twitter, Twittergram)

link
The URL pointing to this specific item, most likely something that’ll load in a web browser. Not a tinyurl or another redirect, this should be the permalink at the originial source (Feedburner)

guid
A unique string identifying the item. For simplicity in publishing this tag may be identical to link, doesn’t have to be. For example, in Twittergrams, the guid is a tinyurl. Still unique, but not technically the link.

pubDate
At some point, every item was published – so it has a publication date. Put it here, in RFC 2822 format, e.g. “Thu, 7 Apr 2005 01:46:36 -0300”. In my aggregators, I don’t guess what the publication date is, I set it to Jan 1, 1970 00:00:00 ², so items don’t show up in reverse chronological order, but they’re still in the system.

enclosure
One enclosure per item. Thanks. Other tags aren’t duplicated, no reason to duplicate this one. Remember, any file can be an enclosure. Not just audio and video files (Flickr).

source
The URL of the site the items was originally published at, think of it as a more general link. This one should be used more by aggregators.

category, comments
I have no qualms with how these tags are used. Yet.

Elsewhere 18 Aug 2008:

“Microblogs absolutely need GUIDs….Since every microblog post originated somewhere, I believe this GUID should almost always be the URL of the individual message on the originating service.” – Dave Slusher

1. I argue link is the URL attribute of the Twittergram’s enclosure
2. Specifying ‘now’ sometimes backfires, bringing old posts back from the past.

I’m skimming Dave Slusher’s shared items. Dave doesnt’ Twitter (at least that I know of) – eavesdropping on shared items is at least as good. Yes, shared items and tumble blogs are exactly the same thing – one is a whole lot easier.

“Researchers at the University of Wales are looking at how introducing different grasses into cattle diets can help reduce methane emissions. Cattle and dairy cows on factory farms are typically fed a high-protein diet of corn and soybeans, which…leads to a variety of digestive problems. Scientists believe that more-digestible feed will reduce these problems and thus help curb related methane emissions. Not surprisingly, some of the grasses found commonly in pastures and meadows in the UK—including white clover, rye, and a flower called bird’s foot trefoil—are all highly digestible.” – Danielle Nierenberg