Robert Scoble and the RSS Advisory Board
On Sunday, Robert Scoble accused the RSS Advisory Board of being a plot by large companies to steal RSS 2.0:
But, what really is cooking here is that RSS has been given (and if you listen to Dave Winer, stolen) to big companies to control. How so? Well, the RSS Advisory board, which includes members from Cisco, Yahoo, Netscape, FeedBurner (er, Google), Microsoft, and Bloglines and this new unofficial board +is+ changing the RSS spec all the time (they are now up to version 2.0.9). Dave Winer, who founded that spec says that's in direct contradiction with the original charter of the RSS Advisory Board that he founded when he moved RSS from UserLand over to Harvard University.
The board hasn't changed the spec "all the time." The change notes for the document show that it only has been revised twice since January 2005, and one of those was an administrative edit that didn't affect the format itself. The other added four words to clarify how namespaces are supported.
Our work's a lot less controversial than Scoble and others make it sound. Most of the board's efforts have been to support publishers and developers on the RSS-Public mailing list, promote things like RSS autodiscovery and the common feed icon, and draft an RSS best-practices profile.
In airing his concerns about FeedBurner, Scoble made this comment about moving a site's feed to a new URL:
Switching feed URLs at this point is audience suicide. If you don't care about your audience you'll do it.
This is a weird point for him to make. When Scoble switched blogging software in 2005, moving his blog from Radio UserLand to WordPress, he left behind thousands of subscribers. His old feed still has 7,520 subscribers in Bloglines.
Recently, he moved his feed from Scobleizer.Wordpress.Com to Scobleizer.Com using an HTTP 302 redirect, which tells RSS readers the move is temporary. His WordPress feed has 3,635 subscribers in Bloglines and his current feed has 747.
If Scoble had been using FeedBurner to publish his feed, he could have switched blogging tools and feed URLs without losing as much as 70 percent of his RSS readership. (Even today, he could fix this by using HTTP 301 redirects to point all those old URLs to the current feed.)
Picture Day in Kenya
Schoolchildren at a rural school near Kakamega, Kenya (photo by Ryan Secrest).
Harry Potter and the Instant Gratification
In honor of tonight's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows midnight release parties at Barnes & Noble stores across the U.S., I'm reissuing some advice I made on my blog in 2003.
There will be hundreds of people lined up to get the book at 12:00 a.m., so it may take until 1:30 a.m. or longer to get yours, even if you preordered a copy.
If you didn't preorder, leave the bookstore shortly before midnight and go to the nearest 24-hour Wal-Mart. (By law, no American is ever more than 30 miles from the nearest Wal-Mart.) You're likely to find what we discovered four years ago -- a large pallet of books and no line of people to get them. You can get the book in minutes.
I suspect this principle also applied to the launch of videogames like EA Sports NCAA Football 2008, which EB Games sold at midnight Tuesday. My sons and I stuck around until 12:45 a.m. to get ours, leading the North Texas Mean Green to several heartbreaking losses until 3 in the morning. You'd be surprised at how many people exhibit this kind of insanity -- lines are already forming for the release of Halo 3 at 12:00:01 a.m. on September 25.
After you buy your Potter book, please resist the urge to drive back to Barnes & Noble and taunt the people in line.
Business Up Front, Democratic Party in the Back
I love politics. I spend hours a day wallowing in it on the Drudge Retort.
I also hate politics, and I'm going to pick on a couple of frequent contributors to Workbench to show why.
You put in a couple of words he DIDN'T say, to try and create One More Bush Screwup, and screwed up yourself. Admit it, instead of trying to contend that black is white. It just shows your bias to be nearly impossible to overcome, and contaminates any other arguments you might make on something he really did wrong.
Plame and Wilson's motivations for lying, not doing their jobs and (in Wilson's case) trying to make political hay in the process are matters for serious consideration, but you're not interested in anyone's bad acts but Republicans, I guess. Fine by me, but don't pretend you're serious about national security, covert status or the law.
I know both Chad and Mike from my mullet-coiffed college years at the University of North Texas. I'm glad they comment here because I enjoy jawing over politics with them, but it's interesting to see how little credence they give to the notion that my viewpoint is motivated by good faith.
Even though we know each other, I can't take a toedip into the subject of current American politics without being accused of being a hopelessly biased Democratic hack. Even on a minor item that said merely that a presidential malaprop was "funny."
It's not that big a deal -- this is nothing compared to the grief I get over that 1990 mullet -- but it's tough to talk politics when people put you on the defensive. Standing up for the sincerity of your own intentions is a sucker's game, like calling a press conference to declare that you only banged prostitutes in Washington D.C. and the brothel owner in New Orleans is a lying whore. It never helps.
College Football is Huge in Clemson's Death Valley
While looking for a photo of the entrance to Clemson's Death Valley football stadium, I found a bizarre form of photography that's exemplified by this picture:
Take a close look at the larger sizes of Steven Bower's image, which is called a tilt shift, and let me know whether you think it's a photo of a real scene or a miniature.
President Bush: My Constituents are The Enemy
Political Fretwork, a liberal blog on Buzzword.Com's free WordPress hosting service, noticed something funny about President Bush's press conference yesterday that has escaped the attention of the media -- the president called the insurgents in Iraq his constituents:... there's a lot of constituencies in this fight -- clearly the American people, who are paying for this, is the major constituency. ...
A second constituency is the military. ...
A third constituency that matters to me a lot is military families. ...
Another constituency group that is important for me to talk to is the Iraqis. ...
And, finally, another constituency is the enemy, who are wondering whether or not America has got the resolve and the determination to stay after them.
The term "constituents" refers to the people served by a politician -- the voters who put Bush in office and keep him there. Although this is clearly an example of the president's seven-year assault on the English language, Fretwork points out that the insurgents in Iraq must be happy with the constituent services they've received under this president:
How many of the enemy would vote to impeach George Bush? I'm betting the minority. He is the best recruiting agent they have.
Robert Heinlein's Encyclopedia of the Future
One of the things I enjoy about reading old science fiction is grading the speculative guesses about the future. In his 1954 novel The Star Beast, Robert Heinlein imagines the encyclopedia of the future, a giant mechanical supercomputer that occupies an entire building:
The universal dictionary in the British Museum was not more knowledgeable than the one in the Under Secretary's office; its working parts occupied an entire building in another part of Capital, and a staff of cyberneticists, semanticians and encyclopedists endlessly fed its hunger for facts. He could be sure that, whatever the "Hroshii" were, the Federation had never heard of them before.
Today, Wikipedia runs off of around 89 machines in Florida, 11 in Amsterdam, and 23 in Korea -- 123 rack-mounted blade servers that could be stored in a single room, maintained by a small staff and accessed anywhere in the world.
Looking up this passage in Google led me to Technovelgy, a site that catalogs predictions about technology in science fiction novels, comparing them to actual development. The site includes 110 of Heinlein's imagined inventions, including the chronometer, a spot-on description in 1940 of an atomic watch.
Social Media
Subscriptions
Blogroll
Projects
RSS Advisory Board
How to Read an RSS Feed with Java Using XOM
The RSS Advisory Board Just Turned 20
Downloading 50,000 Podcast Feeds to Analyze Their RSS
Tara Calishain Explains: What is RSS?
Be Unique And Use RSS Guid Like Everybody Else
Statistics
This blog has been published since Nov. 7, 1999 (a span of 9,375 days).
Thank you for visiting Workbench.
