I'm enjoying several of the active webloggers on Buzzword.Com, which makes it all the more painful that I've been remiss in site maintenance lately.
The server will be down for a few hours this weekend so that I can compact the database files and fix a problem with the shared network drive I'm using for site backups.
Florida attorney Matt Conigliaro has done an unbelievable job of reporting on the state legal issues of the Terry Schiavo case.Beginning in August 2003, a month after he began his weblog, Conigliaro has covered the subject extensively, providing a reference page that manages to be both thorough and fair, though some people would consider his respect for the legal process as an attempt to pick sides:
The facts of this case are terribly sad, but they are not hard to understand. There's really nothing to be confused about, and as best I can tell, nothing's been overlooked by anyone. Terri's situation has arguably received more judicial attention, more medical attention, more executive attention, and more "due process," than any other guardianship case in history. Terri's family has had the benefit of excellent legal representation as well as the Governor's own top-notch attorneys, all of whom have scoured the case for ways to assist the effort to keep Terri's feeding tube in place.
One of the killer applications of weblogging is subject expertise like this. The report-today, gone-tomorrow mainstream media can't often cover something complicated and technical with the same depth as a dedicated expert like Conigliaro, especially television news.
The Online Journalism Awards should be opening for entry nominations again in July. If there are narrow-subject blogs out there as award-worthy as Conigliaro's, I'd love to find them.
FeedBurner Users: Playing With Fire
I read this morning that Andrew Sullivan has added syndicated feeds to his weblog using FeedBurner.No offense to the FeedBurner developers, but every time I see this, I marvel that another weblogger has handed over their most loyal readers to a third party.
FeedBurner offers several features for feed providers, but only one seems genuinely useful: better feed-reading statistics.
The others -- multiple feed format support, podcasting enclosures, Creative Commons licensing -- are easy to get elsewhere. If you aren't using a weblog publishing tool that supports them, you're on the wrong software.
The most highly touted feature of FeedBurner, support for all of the syndication formats, has become a trivial issue. Every popular aggregator can read Atom, RSS 1.0, and RSS 2.0 today, so there's little disadvantage to publishing in only one of these formats.
Perhaps I'm underselling FeedBurner (Stewart Butterfield of Flickr digs them), but people relying on a free web hosting service are taking a huge risk. What position will FeedBurner users be left in if it goes offline, goes pay, or cancels the account?
There's only one place on the FeedBurner site where I could find anything addressing this risk -- the terms of service, which sensibly protects the company from liability:
[Burning Door Syndication Services] may also in its sole discretion, for any reason or no reason and at any time discontinue providing the Service, or any part thereof, with or without notice. You agree that any termination of your access to the Service under any provision of this Agreement may be effected without prior notice, and acknowledge and agree that BDSS may immediately deactivate or delete your account and all related information and files in your account and/or bar any further access to such files or the Service. Further, you agree that BDSS shall not be liable to you or any third-party for any termination of your access to the Service.
Andrew Sullivan will draw thousands of feed subscribers, considering the popularity of his weblog. Wil Wheaton has 12,000 reading him through the service.
If FeedBurner goes out of business, which is the most likely outcome for any Internet startup, they'll instantly lose that entire audience.
Can someone using this service explain how its benefits are worth taking that kind of chance?
Robert Scoble tries out the new JVC GZ-MC200u camcorder in a bathroom at Microsoft after business hours. This video is much more innocent than it sounds.Crossing Over the Line
On last night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart presented clips from the ongoing, 24-7 obscenity that is cable news coverage of the Terri Schiavo case.The Crooks & Liars weblog offers the five-minute segment in QuickTime and Windows Media formats.
To give you an idea of how bad the infotainment cesspool has become, a Fox News morning show invited Crossing Over TV psychic John Edward in studio to talk about it.
John Edward: I do believe that the soul, the consciousness, can communicate when they're in a state, whether it be a mental incapacitated person, someone who's in a coma. It's a consciousness, and the soul has a living consciousness.
Host: So she may not be able to talk with her brain, but she's ...
Edward: But she's clear on what's going on. And I can tell you she's definitely clear on what's happening now around her.
As if that weren't unbalanced enough, Fox News presented the charlatan split-panel with looping video footage of Schiavo.
If you think the religious passions enflamed by the Terri Schiavo case are over the top, imagine where we could be if a slightly more famous Roman Catholic takes a similar turn.The Pope lacks a living will.
The Rev. John J. Paris, a bioethics professor at Boston College:
This is the open invitation to chaos. There are no rules in the Vatican on this sort of thing because, up through 1950, really, it wouldn't happen. Doctors tended to kill people more than save them. Unless there’s some secret document that the pope has written, he becomes a pawn in the hands of bureaucrats. This organization is no different than any others.
Permission to Speak Freely on RSS
After a few webloggers objected to his practice of reproducing their entries in full on his link site, Robert Scoble tied himself into an interesting knot, claiming that RSS is a format that only exists for software to reuse and remix, thus justifying his actions:RSS is a community syndication system. If you don't like your content being reused in weird, dangerous, wacky ways DO NOT PUT YOUR CONTENT INTO RSS!!! Hint: RSS isn't for humans. It's for syndication and resyndication systems to use.
It's an opt-in system. If you don't want it reused, don't put it in! Easy. End of discussion.
Scoble's right to describe syndication as opt-in, and the availability of content in an XML format makes it easier to work with than HTML. But as we've seen with Google Toolbar and Greasemonkey, HTML's not exactly difficult for user agent software to parse. The markup's out there in plain text, making it a lot closer to RSS than to a reuse-inhibiting format like PDF.
One of the looming controversies for syndication is the legality of feed reuse and republication in the absence of an explicit license tag such as those offered by Creative Commons.
Before he shuttered his linkblog, Scoble seemed to be acting from the presumption that if a feed is online, he can do anything he wants with it, because the format's intended for reuse.
I don't mind that personally, because I want to encourage republication of my syndicated feeds, even on commercial sites. I just added the Creative Commons Attribution license to my feeds to make this policy official.
But in a general sense, it seems inarguable that the availability of a feed grants no legal rights to reuse its items, beyond fair use.
A feed is a copyrighted work. If a feed provider wants to forbid commercial reuse or public redistribution of the full text of items, that's something we ought to respect.
If high-profile reusers like Scoble make this a big deal, we'll take the informal situation today -- where feeds are republished in the absence of explicit permission -- and turn it into one where toolmakers have to examine license tags before allowing the functionality.
Perhaps this is a good thing, but it goes against an important principle I learned as a teen: It's always easier to ask forgiveness than to seek permission.
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