“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

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.

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.

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?

Most of my posts are too long by half. They should be briefer, though perhaps not as brief as this one.

Earlier in the week, I mentioned “my frustration”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000483.html with the way Onfolio deals with blogging snippets of text captured from web pages.

Onfolio is like a really smart bookmarking tool (among other things). It goes beyond regular bookmarks by letting you write a short summary of the link and it will index the content of the linked page for its search function. Even better, it lets you capture snippets of text along with the link, or even a local copy of the web page.

Their “new beta”:http://beta.onfolio.com also provides a number of mechanisms for sharing your collections of links, comments, snippets and web pages, including the ability to automatically blog items. In some cases (items captured from RSS feeds), the post contains both your comment and a blockquoting of the captured text. For some odd reason though, when it automatically blogs a snippet, it only posts a link and your comment. The snippet that you so deliberately selected to illustrate the relevance of the link isn’t used.

I’d offered construtive criticism about this in their forum, and they’d noted it, but said they weren’t going to change the behavior before the product left beta. I guess my “persuasive reasoning”:http://www.onfolio.com/support/forums/messageview.cfm?catid=10&threadid=628 finally sunk in though, because they just added “a comment”:http://www.geekfun.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=483 to my “earlier post”:http://www.geekfun.com/archives/000483.html letting me (and my vast and influential readership) know they were changing the behavior.

It’s risky changing a spec so close to shipping, even if its a small change like this one, but I think this was the right thing to do. In doing so, they remove a barrier to Onfolio’s blogging functionality reaching its full potential.