Monthly Archives: March 2005

Comments on PubSub’s Structured Blogging Initiative

“PubSub”:http://www.pubsub.com has a great search engine for the “incremental web”:http://blog.topix.net/archives/000066.html, which allows you to keep track of results via RSS. I’m starting to favor it over “Technorati”:http://www.technorati.com because PubSub passes forward the full text of the matched item and clearly identifies the source (if only they also passed forward the original title), whereas Technorati passes forward an often much too brief summary.

None of which is really the point of this post. The real point of this post is that PubSub has a “structured blogging”:http://www.structuredblogging.org/ initiative that intends to create standardization around the metadata and presentation of various chunks of content. For example, an event announcement would be tagged a certain way and would be formatted and presented in a consistent style.

If widely adopted, something like this could improve both human cognition, by making it easy to spot the announcments of a gig in a bands blog, and machine automation by, for example, making it easy to find all the live bands playing in Seattle with “stein” in ther name on a given weekend without relying on the “local alternative weekly”:http://www.thestranger.com.

For more details: Jon Udell: PubSub’s structured blogging initiative

Terry Schiavo and the Ghouls

Its hard not to feel anything but bad for the family of Terry Schiavo, both her parents, who can’t bare to give up hope even after so many years, and her husband, who wants her to finally have her final peace after years on life support.

On the other hand, its hard not to be disgusted by the politicians and the pressure groups who are using her as an undead meat-puppet to try and advance their political agenda. Of course, its really no suprise considering that “our” president, George Bush, and the majority leaders of the house and senate (the corrupt Tom DeLay, and equally corrupt “Dr.” Bill Frist) are themselves soulless meat-puppets, animated by the gnarled and fetid claws of Satan and his minions that they have stuck up their backsides.

Stupid iTunes Trick

I just loaded a couple of days worth of songs from SXSW into iTunes this weekend. I was careful to add them all to a playlist so I could find them again.

Now I’m trying to sync my iPod and it’s complained there isn’t enough room. So, what I’d like to do is uncheck all the songs in the playlist and tell iTunes only to sych checked songs, but as far as I can tell, there is no damn way to check or uncheck items in bulk.

Dumb, Apple. I guess I need to buy a bigger iPod, or not.

Update: Problem solved. I just have to open the help file, find the keyboard shortcuts, scan the list, and discover that control-clicking will do what I want.

Perfect Path: Odeo, integrity and credibility

bq. What bugs me about Odeo is that they’re a “podcasting” company without any podcasts! How much credibility does that show – would you have bought blogging from Evan if he didn’t have a blog – ? To me, every day that that continues is more evidence that all it’s about is sucking cash out of a market that other people have built.

Apparently the Internet is Broken Today

I’m trying to find something I came across yesterday or the day before. Something about a social networking application that lets you register a profile and then see the profile’s of the other people using the net cafe you are in.

I’d remember I’d seen something on “Ask Metafilter”:http://ask.metafilter.com , but Ask Metafilter has been down for the past 30 minutes at least. I thought maybe it was popular with the Del.icio.us, and I like the “fac.etio.us”:http://fac.etio.us interface to Del.icio.us data, but I found fac.etio.us was down when I visited.

What the hell? And why did I waste 7 minutes writing about it? And why have you wasted however long it took you to read this far? Man, do we suck, or what?