Simple Syndication in Communist China

While researching the skateboard jump over the Great Wall of China, I found RSS in an unusual place: The English language edition of People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, offers 18 RSS 2.0 newsfeeds.

In addition to feeds on current events in news, business, sports, and other areas, the paper devotes feeds to party leaders such as Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao.

Outside observers of China often look to People's Daily for clues about the inner workings of the government, as described in Wikipedia:

Newspaper articles in the People's Daily are often not read for content, so much as placement. A large number of articles devoted to a political figure or idea is often taken as a sign that that official is rising.

In addition, editorials in the People's Daily are also still regarded as fairly authoritative statements of government policy.

Sports · Rss · 2005/07/10 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Dennis the Menace

Floridian blogger Jim Mathies is riding out Hurricane Dennis from a coastal town close to where the eye of the storm is coming ashore.

This is the strongest storm to ever hit the Florida panhandle, and you have to worry about the people there when you read his increasingly tense updates.

Here's what he wrote an hour ago:

Things are starting to get ugly now. The wind has picked up to a constant roar and has shifted North. The water in the air is so thick I can bearly see across the street. I think the worst is still to come.

Last night:

I've decided to stay, but the butterflies in my stomach are back. I'll be able to evac north and east over the bay bridge up to the point where winds hit 45mph. At 45mph, the bridges close and then I'm stuck. I'll just hunker down for now and hopefully ride it out without harm, hoping a tornado doesn't decide to cut my house in half.

Two days ago:

Someone pinged me to ask if I'm planning on staying for Dennis. Yes, I'll most likely stay, unless it's a cat 4+ and making landfall within 50 miles of Destin. (I'm not that crazy.)

Dennis is a category four storm making landfall around 45 miles from Destin.

Florida · 2005/07/10 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

I toured Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral this past week, an exciting time to visit because of the impending shuttle launch scheduled for Wednesday July 13 at 3:51 p.m. Eastern. The closest we got to the shuttle Discovery was the sight of the top of its external tank and booster rockets -- the rest was obscured behind launch pad 39B, from our vantage point on an observation tower.

NASA, which used to syndicate updates in a proprietary XML format, offers an RSS feed for news related to Wednesday's launch.

Florida · 2005/07/09 · Comment · Link

Sam Ruby identifies the IP address of every person who comments on his weblog, as you can see by hovering over a name.

For message boards and weblog software I have developed, I won't reveal user IP addresses out of privacy and security considerations. Some users have static IP addresses, either from a high-speed Internet provider or their workplace, and could be vulnerable to hacking or harassment.

When I want more accountability for anonymous comments, I present a page of posts from a specific address without revealing the address.

2005/07/01 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Headline Created to Enable Controversy

I've won Anil Dash's new intellectual dishonesty award for my item on Bram Cohen's technological manifesto. The award appears to be issued weekly, which means Karl Rove goes home empty-handed.

Dash faults me for not approaching Cohen in e-mail, where he could have explained himself before the story got more traction with weblogs and the media.

Perhaps he has a point, but I regarded an essay Cohen linked on his front page for two years as fair game for evaluation, independent of anything else he might say on the subject, and I don't know the guy. The idea his manifesto might be a parody never entered my mind, nor did it occur to anyone else I read yesterday.

The headline was based on my read of Cohen's statement "I build systems to ... commit digital piracy." It was a jaw-dropping thing to discover through a comment on Ed Felten's weblog.

I would never try to mislead people on Workbench to spike traffic or bait the media. I gave Cohen's statement the huge play I thought it deserved, and when I was told he called it a parody, I added an update to the post. Between that update and visitor comments, I think readers could fairly judge the justification for giving it a headline as big as "Boy Trapped in Refrigerator Eats Own Foot."

As for my last media hack, the idea I would use my 36 hours of fame to criticize the papacy was never entertained. Though I have concerns with the church that would explain the 26 years that have passed since my last confession, I'm not particularly eager to become the Catholic Salman Rushdie.

Domains · 2005/06/30 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

This morning's Washington Post reports that the military has corrected a decline in recruiting:

The Army has exceeded its monthly nationwide recruiting goals for June, stopping a four-month slide and giving recruiters hope as they try to make up a significant deficit in the remaining three months of the fiscal year.

Unless I'm overlooking something, this appears to be Enron accounting. In May, the Army reduced monthly recruiting goals by 17 percent.

Politics · 2005/06/30 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Wired News follows the discovery of Bram Cohen's technological agenda declaring "digital piracy" as one of his goals, which he describes as a work of parody.

Anybody who thinks that they might produce technology at some point in the future that might be used for piracy has to watch everything that they say.

I suspect this will continue to be true until a file-sharing technology gets a slam-dunk victory in the courts.

Politics · 2005/06/30 · Comment · Link

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