I just finished watching Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry.

It’s a good flick. I learned about Kerry I didn’t know.

I find myself wondering what a parallel film about George W. covering a similar period of time would be like. It’s hard to imagine that W had gone through nearly as much by his late 20s. Some people dismiss Kerry’s vietnam service as an political ploy, but he took real risks, he put his life on the line for something he believed in and he took responsibility for the lives of a boatfull of men. When he came back, he risked the political career he’d aspired to by opposing the war. Again, his critics deride him as an opportunist, but I fail to see any dishonor in launching a political career by strongly supporting a cause you take to heart.

What had W done at that point, how had he taken responsibility for the lives of his fellow man, what risks did he take, besides driving under the influence?

egoClip – The RSS Aggregator that Prioritizes Your News

Egoclip is the first RSS aggregator I know of to apply machine learning techniques to try to automatically identify posts of interest.

I don’t know exactly how it works. I don’t even know roughly how it works.

What I do know is using it is frustrating. It happily imported my feeds from sharpreader with their folder hierarchy, but when I tried to reorganize them, I quickly found that there is no obvious UI for creating new folders.

More annoying, I can’t use the arrow keys to navigate through posts because the focus switches to the post reading pane.

There are other frustrations too, which is a shame, because taken together, they will probably be enough to keep me from investing the time in using egoclip needed to train it.

I’ll check in on egoclip in another month in the hopes that it’s good enough at being a basic aggregator to be worth experimenting with.

All of this illustrates a basic issue with any product that requires the user to make a commitment beyond purchase/download to take advantage of the product — you need to give the users something good up front to make them stick around for the grand finale. It’s really no different from telling a good story. The real payoff might come at the end, but you’ve got to keep the audience interested.

This is totally frustrating.

I downloaded iPodder earlier this week and installed it, and promptly did absolutely nothing with it — the directory of podcast feeds is nearly completely information free. It’s just a list of links with brief titles and no description, which makes it harder to find feeds of interest.

The incredibly frustrating part is that the front page of iPodder.org is a blog and Adam is blogging about new iPodder feeds along with short descriptions, but these descriptions don’t show up in the directory.

Clearly there is a need for some rearchitecture.

I finally enabled fulltext in my RSS feed.

I also installed mt-blacklist because I just took a huge hit from a content spammer who added ~60 bits of spam. I’m not sure the plugin is working 100% right — the config page says “inactive” at the top and I don’t seem to be able to turn it on. I am unable to dispatch bunches of spam with a few clicks though, which is a good start.

UpdateI figured out why I couldn’t turn mt-blacklist on, I think. The user I was logged in as didn’t have complete control over all the blogs hosted by the installation. I changed users and was able to activate.

Yahoo! News – Code Name: Geekfun

I was looking at a new search engine called snap.com and I couldn’t think of anything to search on, so I entered “geekfun” for my search term.

Suddenly I was getting all these pages that referenced the term “Code name: Geekfun.” Most of them weren’t available, or if they were, I couldn’t find any mention of “geekfun.”

I finally found a google cache of yahoo page of an syndicated LA times story on the codenames given to various tech products.

Kinda dull, if you ask me. I was hoping to uncover some vast conspiracy involving the international pickled herring cartel, the LA rotary club and the guy who sold me my last pair of shoes.

iPodder, the cross-platform Podcast receiver.
This is cool, it might even be very cool.

The cool part is that it’s a tool to help you automatically load audio from MP3 blogs onto your iPod.

The very cool part will come when I find stuff I want to listen to.

Then I’ll become frustrated that Apple’s audio book bookmarking features don’t seem to work with anything but AAC files with an .m4b file extension.

Or maybe I won’t, because maybe Apple will have realized that someone is giving them something good and support their independent developers.