GeniusEngineer Blog of the Day

Wow. It appears that this is the Blog of the day at GeniusEngineer.com. I've never visited the site before, but I'm flattered by being chosen just the same. [ ... 29 words ... ]

Videos on tape (Travan, not VHS)

Oh and while I'm writing about watching video files on my TV, I've been thinking of getting myself a tape drive. Sure, I'll use it to actually, finally, back up all the important things I have littered around my handful of machines. Having established a backup routine at work, I've gotten to thinking. How bad an idea would it be to use a tape drive to store TV shows? I've been capturing them with the VCD format, which gives me around 600MB per hour of show. This fills up my drive pretty quickly, obviously. I know I really should take sometime to revisit things and try another video codec, since originally I used VCD because I burned everything to CD for my DVD player, but now I'm streaming files to my Powerbook over the network which gives me a lot more flexibility in recording options. However, not burning to CD leaves me with a hard drive full of video that I'm hesitant to delete yet have no good reason to need laying around on a high speed hard drive. But, burning all that to a spindle-worth of blank CDs without a Lego Mindstorms based CD-changer robot leaves me shuddering. I recall reading about a DJ-bot that did this for playing music, and I notice via Slashdot that someone with a decent woodshop has provided plans for such a beast for a CD writer. But I can't afford the Legos at the present moment, and I'll only end up hurting myself working with power tools. Then, I remember that high capacity tapes make backing up lots of data easy at work. I know that the tape trade off is capacity and price for speed of access. But, if all I need to do is skip from one file to the next and only need relatively low bandwidth to stream the file from the tape, this sounds like a great way to archive video. Depending on the video compression, maybe I could fit a whole season or two of a show onto a single tape. Seems like a good idea, though pricey. But maybe the price and cost of media would offset the pain in the ass of any other method. I probably should look more into the price and pain of a DVD burner, but the idea of more disc-like things laying around worries me. What do you think? [ ... 995 words ... ]

My Powerbook's on TV

I don't gush about it very often, but I love my 12" Powerbook. Since I got it this past March, it has been my primary machine for both work and home. And other than wishing that there was a 1GB memory module out for it and grumbling that I've lost one of the rubber footies on the bottom, I've been extremely happy with it. And just last night, I was reminded of yet another feature that's made me glad I got it: the included Composite/SVHS video adapter. I'd had the AV cable for my iBook before it, but the use of the adapter on the Powerbook has a very important difference: dual display mode. See, when I connected my iBook up to my home entertainment complex, I got reduced resolution back on the LCD, and anything I did that went full screen (ie. playing a DVD or a movie file) took over the machine. But with the Powerbook, its connection to my television is just a second desktop, not much different than the second monitor I use at work. So, while I'm at home on the futon with my girlfriend, I often stream videos off a PC in the next room that's been recording TV shows for me, and present them on this second desktop. Most apps I use to view movies, such as Quicktime Pro and VideoLAN, allow me to pick a monitor for fullscreen mode. Meanwhile, the LCD on the Powerbook is still available for other work while we watch. It's just a little thing, but it's a thing that lets me get much of the benefit of a dedicated Home Theater PC without having to buy or build a box that looks nice alongside all our video game consoles. While I'd still like to take on the project someday, my Powerbook does just fine for the display and audio end of things, while an aging Windows PC in the next room snags a few TV shows for me. Of course, if all you want is an HTPC, the Powerbook is expensive overkill. But, if you're shopping for a laptop and want some fringe benefits, I think this is definitely one that doesn't get much attention. [ ... 459 words ... ]

Macromedia Central and Deja Vu?

Macromedia Central provides a safe environment for developers to deploy occasionally-connected applications. Using Macromedia Central, developers can create an application and give it away for free. Or they can sell it to end users using the Try/Buy framework that is part of Central. Source: Macromedia - DevNet : Macromedia Central: How it Works I’ve had a bit of enthusiasm for Flash lately. So, this Macromedia Central thing that’s been on its way for a little while now looks very interesting.

But… What differentiates it from every other “widgets on your desktop” or “widgets in a little box” technology that’s come before? Remember DoDots ? CNN called them the web without a browser and there was general gushing here and there about it. At one point, I was close to being drafted to write a few promotional games using their SDK, and it seemed nifty enough. No clients bit, though. And all that remains of the company on the web are ghost pages and ex-employee photo albums and reunions. Oh, and I still have a mousepad and a clipboard from the dev kit.

And then there’s Java Web Start and Konfabulator . Have any of these sorts of things really taken off? I mean, they all have their share of nifty things, but has this idea of a centrallized corral of mini-apps ever paid off? Flash is yet another cool technology with which to develop these things, but will Central take off?

I’m not trying to whiz on anyone’s Cheerios, since I honestly think these things are nifty, but then again I like widgets with fun buttons to push.

Google ads getting monotonous?

Well, I forgot to mention it, but I emailed Google awhile back about their rejecting my site for Google ?AdSense. They got back to me and let me in the club, which is demonstrated by the skyscraper ad to the right. So far, I seem to be on the road to earning free hosting for the month, if my clickthroughs keep up, which is more than I'd hoped for. I only hope that if everyone's seeing this kind of performance, that Google makes some money at it and doesn't have to cancel the program. My only complain now is this: Can I get some ad rotation? I'm not sure what you're seeing, but I've been looking at the same 4 ads for backup solutions since I first plopped the code in. At first I thought it was neat, since I'd been talking about backups at the time and the ads seemed an intelligent complement. But that story's long since scrolled off the page, and nothing else interesing has come up since. Maybe this is by design, but I expect my clickthroughs to stop pretty soon. Now, I have no ambitions to get rich quick via Google. If they happen to pay out enough to cover my hosting costs, I'm abso-frickin-loutely ecstatic. So, I won't be spending much time obsessing over search terms and "borrowing" public domain works to boosting my ?AdSense revenue, but it seems like the service could use a little freshening. Am I missing something? Update: Heh, funny thing. No sooner do I post this and visit the site to check out how things look, the Google ad appears to have rotated. Is someone watching? Heh, heh. [ ... 413 words ... ]

Desktops are better than laptops?

What I've discovered, though, is that my desktop PC, for standard development tasks, is astoundingly faster than my work laptop for just about everything. Source: rc3.org | Developing on my game box Personally, though I really do want a new PowerMac G5 I can’t see myself investing much in desk-anchored computing anymore. Not since I got my first laptop, and later my first wireless ethernet card. What I can see myself doing, though, is maybe investing a little bit into a new PC for games, and maybe for a box with lots of storage and CPU power to stick in a closet somewhere and use via network.

Sure, a dirt cheap box tied to the spot via a dozen cables should be able to smoke my lightweight personal computing device… but what if I use that stationary box from remote with that lightweight device? It’s client/server all over again, but this time I own both the server and the client.

See… that’s where I really think it’s at. :)

Finding the RSS in Amazon searches

Amazon.com Syndicated Content is delivered in RSS format. RSS is a standard format (in XML) for delivering content that changes on a regular basis. Content is delivered in small chunks, generally a synopsis, preview, or headline. Selected categories, subcategories and search results in Amazon.com stores now have RSS feeds associated with them, delivering a headline-view of the top 10 bestsellers in that category or set of search results. Source: Amazon.com Syndicated Content (via Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor's eJournal - Amazon Does RSS, Officially) This is very cool, though the feeds a little hard to find at first. Don’t look for the orange XML or RSS buttons – use RSS autodiscovery to find the feed associated with a search. (In other words, the URL will be in a link tag in the header of a search results page.)

And though I don’t really want to stir up trouble, I find it strange that Amazon uses RSS v0.91, and that they link to Netscape (an all but defunct entity) and not a spec hosted by UserLand or Harvard.

Anyway, at least they‘re providing feeds in some format!

HTTP/1.1 From header and FOAF use in RSS aggregators

Privacy issues aside (for the moment), there is a request header called "FROM", RFC 2616 s14.22 describes it. Now, it does say it should, if given, contain an Internet e-mail address for the human user who controls the requesting user agent. SHOULD isn't MUST though, so what putting the user's homepage there? It also says "In particular, robot agents SHOULD include this header so that the person responsible for running the robot can be contacted if problems occur on the receiving end." Source: eric scheid: Atom aggregator behavior (HTTP level) [dive into mark] Ask a stupid question , get a smart answer .

Last year, I thought it was a good idea to abuse referers in order to leave footprints behind when I consume RSS feeds. Then, this past January, the abuse in the practice was revealed and using the User-Agent header was recommended for this.

So, just for the hell of it, I asked about the User-Agent header for use in the context over at Mark’s place to see what responses I’d get. The one that seemed most informative was from Eric Scheid as quoted above, referring me to the HTTP/1.1 spec, section 14.22

As per Eric’s comment and the spec, the value of a “From” header SHOULD be an email address, but I would think that using a URL wouldn’t be too much an abuse of this header. Seems like a good idea to stick either the URL to a blog here, or even better, stick the URL to your FOAF file here.

I’d really like to see this get built into aggregators as an option, though not turned on by defauilt for privacy’s sake. I like the idea of leaving my name or a trail back to me at the doorstep of people whose feeds I’m reading, and I like the idea of standardizing the practice as cleanly as possible. Using the “From” header seems to be the best option so far, versus header abuse and User-Agent overloading.

Man. One of these days, I really have to get around to studying those specs in full, rather than just sporadically referencing them. Thank goodness for smart guys like Mark and Eric (among others) who actually take the time to read these things and try to communicate the gist to the rest of us busy developers!

Tap + Click = Two mouse buttons on a Mac trackpad?

I have my powerbook trackpad set to accept taps as mouse clicks, which makes the behavior identical to the button. What I'd like to do is set one of them to behave as a second mouse button. That sounds like it should be possible. All of the usual suspects have thus far failed me. I'm surprised there isn't something on versiontracker -- it seems like it would be a popular hac Source: osxhack: new powerbook - two button mouse from trackpad? Sounds like a great idea to me. Has it been done? Or has someone realized that it’s actually a really bad idea for some reason I haven’t thought of? [ ... 241 words ... ]

Textile + Wiki = ...?

Yesterday, I downloaded Mark Pilgrim’s Python implementation of Textile and integrated it into the new hackish blog posting feature I added to my aggregator, and it works great. Now, I want Textile in my wiki. I google for it and don’t find much on wikis and Textile together. I wonder how this could be most easily done? In TWiki ? MoinMoin ? KWiki ? [ ... 175 words ... ]

"It isn't working."

Words to strike terror into the heart of the home's designated computer geek... Source: Caveat Lector: Iulii 13, 2003 – Iulii 19, 2003 Archives This doesn’t happen to me at home, but it strikes terror into me whether I’m at work, visiting relatives, or mistaken for an employee at some computer store. “It doesn’t work” always seems to be the introduction into a great, murky mystery which usually leads me into wishing I was either a mind reader or had a cluebat on me. :) [ ... 400 words ... ]

As it turns out, software needs hardware to run.

RAM and motherboards are the least likely suspect in kernel panics, but if you just have a new system, and or just installed new memory and you get a kernel panic, that's the most likely place to start looking. ... use the Hardware Test CD ... Source: Mac OS X Kernel Panic FAQ In my current job as jack-of-all-trades tech guy, I have to deal with everything. Lately, it’s been a 15” PowerBook that’s been having random crashes and happily corrupting its hard drive. Being a software guy, I run every program I can think of: Disk First Aid, DiskWarrior, fsck. Reinstalled Photoshop. Then, tried wiping the machine and installing OS X, which was fine until the installer itself crashed. Kernel panic after kernel panic. At one point, I considered consulting Eliza.

Turns out it was the memory. We found this out by finally running the one bit of software that, as a software focused guy, I hadn’t even conceived of: The Hardware Diagnostics CD.

Changes in my link blogging

You might notice a sudden rise in link-quote-comment entries around here, depending on how well this works for my lazy self. I just threw together a quick bookmarklet and aggregator-integrated posting hack for myself, hoping it will be as easy as BookmarkBlogger for noting down URLs of interest throughout the day. Nothing revolutionary, just slightly new for me in daily use. But, I was starting to wish that I could provide a little more info around my posted links, such as why I was sharing the link and from where I found it. So, I'll be trying a slightly different approach. Let me know if it gets annoying. [ ... 109 words ... ]

On tag uniqueness and versioning in Pie/Echo feeds

"feed" is not a very unique name, and if another format were to come along with the same top level element we would not be able to write a format driver for it. Our architecture keys off the top-level element. I suggest changing the top-level element to indicate the format, and also add a version number so that aggregators can have an idea of what spec the content provider is using. I imagine Radio is not the only aggregator that would like to key off the name of the top-level element. Source:Radio UserLand: Radio gets some kind of Echo support Nope, "feed" seems like a pretty poor choice as a name if the goal was uniqueness in the tag name itself. But, since we have XML namespaces to ensure uniqueness between vocabularies, we can instead focus on a clear and simple name that only needs to be unique within the vocabulary. And as for versioning, why not consider different versions of a namespace to be entirely different vocabularies, each with different namespaces? I did some quick Googling and found the following: ... documents, containing multiple markup vocabularies, pose problems of recognition and collision. Software modules need to be able to recognize the tags and attributes which they are designed to process, even in the face of "collisions" occurring when markup intended for some other software package uses the same element type or attribute name. These considerations require that document constructs should have universal names, whose scope extends beyond their containing document. This specification describes a mechanism, XML namespaces, which accomplishes this. Source:Namespaces in XML One of the core features of XML is its ability to deal with changes in the rules for data (hence the extensible in its name -- Extensible Markup Language). As changes are made to XML vocabularies, the creation of multiple versions is inevitable. This makes it necessary to mark the versions clearly, for human and machine information. The clear marking of versions can be used for driving validation, or for branch processing according to the requirements of each version. You can mark the version of an XML vocabulary in many ways. This discussion focuses on the use of XML namespaces for marking versions. Source:Tip: Namespaces and versioning I haven't looked into RadioUserLand feed handling architecture, but how difficult would it be to use the namespace and tag together as key, rather than the tag alone? [ ... 484 words ... ]

Ultra-liberal feed parser

This is an ultra-liberal feed parser, suitable for reading RSS and Pie feeds as produced by weblogs, news sites, wikis, and many other types of sites. Source:Dive Into Mark: Feed Parser As I guessed and as Mark replied, his ultra-liberal feed parser now supports initial Pie (nee nEcho (nee Echo (nee Pie))) feeds. But you know what else? He left in support for RSS. My news aggregator remains fully able to read all my feeds even after dropping in his new code. No breakage here. [ ... 132 words ... ]

Backups with my eyes closed?

Okay, so at my new job I'm the Guy if it has a transistor in it. I'm developer, sysadmin, and hardware jockey all in one. This is fun to a certain extent, since it tests pretty much everything I know from A through Z. And so far, I'm doing okay. Every now and then, though, I get a bit stumped. My most recent adventure involves developing a backup routine for the office. I just got tape backup working on a Linux box for a big Samba-shared directory that we all work out of. I'm currently winging it with star and cpio in =CRON=-scheduled scripts that manage a 6-tape rotation for me. Full backups on alternating tapes on Fridays, with incrementals inbetween on tapes labeled by the day. I even have the server eject the tape and IM me a few times until I go change to the day's tape. Tested recovery, and though it could be smoother, it is at least possible at the moment. I figure this is pretty good for my first personal encounter with managing serious backup. I plan to keep researching and to upgrade software at some point soon. So, now my boss asks me: "Hey, can you backup this other folder for me? I don't want to share it, though, and I don't want you to be able to read the files." This folder contains some important yet sensitive things like salary information and other things to which I have no business having access. My stumper then, is this: How do I grab (or cause to be uploaded) a folder of files for backup, say as large as 2GB, from a WinXP machine, without having any access myself to read the file contents. I'll be able to install whatever I need on the WinXP machine, but the idea is that, when the bits leave that machine for the Linux backup server, there should be no way for me to read their contents. But, I must be able to usefully backup and, in conjunction with the owner of the files, restore in case of disaster. Oh yeah, and I have no budget for software. So, I'm trying to work this out using only free tools. So, my first though is some sort of encryption on the WinXP machine. Encrypt with GPG or something, leaving my boss with the secret key on a floppy and the passphrase in his head. Upload these files to a special folder on our shared drive, and it all gets backed up like everything else. Or, since I don't even really want to know the names or number of files in this sensitive folder, can I somehow ZIP up the whole shebang and encrypt that before uploading? Under Linux, none of this would be much of a problem to me. But, under WinXP, my knowledge of available tools and means of automation fail me. Any hints from out there? [ ... 1697 words ... ]

Is the magic in RSS, or in Syndication?

Tools will start to support necho as well as RSS. The formats will coexist, just as RSS 0.91 and RDF and RSS 2.0 coexist today. Furthermore, this coexistence will be transparent, just like today. Over time, necho will, hopefully, become the standard. In the meantime, there will not be a major catastrophe of incompatibility... Eventually, some of the other formats might become less used, and will be phased out (this is something that is already happening, for example, with the transition from RSS 0.91 to RSS 2.0). And because, currently, RSS is being almost exclusively used for updates and regenerated constantly at each endpoint, there will be little if any switchover cost, again, as an example of this I put forward the transition from RSS 0.91 to RSS 2.0 that happened last year. Obviously, it's on us, the developer community, to add necho support without disruption, and it's not a problem. After all, we are already doing it today, and moving most (hopefully all) tools into necho will eventually reduce work for developers in the future, allowing us to, finally, concentrate on improving the tools rather than on how to let them connect to each other. Source:d2r: why (not)echo is important -- part 2 When I read Dave's post that developers were trying to "rip up the pavement, break everything and start over", I wondered what he was talking about. (Strangely, I can't find the original posting on Dave's blog. Maybe the statement was revised in the face of a later endorsement of the project?) The reason I was wondering is because nothing broke on my desktop. Every RSS feed to which I subscribed was still feeding me RSS, and my home-brew aggregator continued crunching and delivering my fix. In fact, my aggregator's RSS consumption is based on Mark Pilgrim's Ultra-liberal RSS parser. And, it looks like Mark's been one of the developers involved in the (not)Echo project. Mark didn't break anything for me, and couldn't if he wanted to. On the contrary, he continues to offer his code, and even updated it not more than a month ago to address link-vs-guid concerns in a useful way. Hell, even though Mark demonstrated his break with RSS tinkering rather concretely by implementing a very literal interpretation of the spec, I can still download his working RSS parser code. I'm a user and a developer all at once: I produce RSS, I consume RSS, I develop with RSS, and yet I'm watching (not)Echo with great interest and welcome it when it's ready. I fully expect that, in my tinkering, it'll take me less than a lazy evening's work to put together a template to publish a (not)Echo feed from my blog, and to add (not)Echo support to my aggregator. Hell, I might even get another parser from Mr. Pilgrim to drop into my project. But, as long as others are still producing and expecting RSS, I'll still accept and offer RSS. No breakage here. In fact, if I get off my lazy butt, I'll unfunkify my own feed and upgrade it to RSS 2.0 while I'm at it. This isn't really heavyweight stuff here. Then, I read things like Jon Udell's Conversation with Mr. Safe and other worries that the whole technology of web content syndication and management will be avoided by big money, or even more horribly, co-opted by big money in the confusion. Has the BBC or the New York Times expressed any change of heart with their decision to offer their content in a syndication format? Has the basic tech stopped working? There are no pieces of sky on my balcony, though I fully admit that I might be too naive to see them. See, to me, RSS ain't the thing. Content syndication and aggregation are the thing, and that's going strong. Are the people with big money interested in this geeky thing called RSS, or are they interested in syndication and aggregation? You know, getting their content out there and read? Do they know that this (not)Echo effort hasn't actually made RSS-supporting software stop working, nor will it ever? Just because a bunch of bloggers and tinkerers got together and decided to start making an alternate format and API doesn't mean that the existing, mature technology suddenly goes sproing. In fact, unless or until this upstart (not)Echo project builds something amazing in terms of in-spec capabilities and vendor support, the currently working RSS-based tech is a safe bet. And, in fact, I'd be willing to bet that RSS will still be a force to consider in years to come, even if (not)Echo introduces some irresistable pull. Companies like Blogger and ?SixApart would reveal themselves to be run by morons if they screwed users by dumping RSS overnight. (And that's ignoring the fact that someone would come along and whip something up to fix their idiocy somehow.) And, I'm sure Microsoft or some well-heeled vendor could try stepping in with a format of their own and try to steamroll it through with their own blogging tools and aggregation services, but you know, they're not omnipotent. The Internet didn't go away when MSN was introduced, and the web full of RSS feeds won't go away even if they introduce MSNBlogs or some such. It'd take a gigantic fight, lots of very shiny bits, or many bribes. I mean, that's what it takes to get my cats to do anything. [ ... 1028 words ... ]

Washed Up, Huh?

Mr Safe: Tim Bray said you're all washed up, kind of like Charles Goldfarb. Source:backend.userland.com: Checking in with Mr Safe Dave Winer has done a tremendous amount of work on RSS and invented important parts of it and deserves a huge amount of credit for getting us as far as we have. However, just looking around, I observe that there are many people and organizations who seem unable to maintain a good working relationship with Dave. I regularly get pissed-off at Dave but I really truly do think he's trying to Do The Right Thing; but there are many people out there who can't get past being pissed off. This is what life is like. There's an uncannny echo here, for me. The thing that came before XML was called SGML. SGML was largely invented, and its landscape dominated, by a burly, bearded, brilliant New Yorker, Charles Goldfarb, who is currently making a well-deserved killing bringing out the Definitive XML Series of books for Prentice-Hall. Charles is loquacious, persistent, smart, loud-voiced, and nearly always gets his way. There were a lot of people out there (still are, I guess) whom Charles drives completely nuts and just won't work with him. Which is one of the reasons that, when we invented XML, we felt the need to give it a new name and a new acronym and so on. Mind you, Charles, who as I said is no dummy, climbed on board the XML bandwagon about fifteen seconds after it got rolling and was a major help in getting the thing finished and delivered. Source:ongoing: I Like Pie I'm very confused about this. Dave (or rather, Mr Safe) says that Tim Bray said something nasty about him here. In fact, Dave says that Tim said he's all washed up, like Charles Goldfarb. But as I read it, I'd love to be washed up like Charles Goldfarb, seeing as he's "currently making a well-deserved killing bringing out ... books for Prentice-Hall", having "climbed on board the XML bandwagon about fifteen seconds after it got rolling and was a major help in getting the thing finished and delivered". Sounds like Mr. Goldfarb is still very active in his community, still considered an authority, and is being rewarded for it. I hope I'm that kind of washed up someday. In fact, it'd be pretty keen if that's what people meant if someday they said, "Les is Dead", though I can't find where Tim said that. So, where's the nastiness? It's not like Tim took notes from Mark's spanish lessons and told Dave to go "chinga tu madre" or "come verga". That's nasty. Far as I can tell, Tim compared Dave to a guy in another community who has his own contingent of haters yet is still undeniably a brilliant guy just trying to Do The Right Thing as he sees it. Was the nastiness in saying that some people can't "maintain a good working relationship with Dave"? Or that Tim gets "regularly ... pissed-off at Dave"? I mean, they're both obviously true. It would have been nasty and untrue had Tim said that no one can maintain a good relationship with Dave, because there are also obviously a lot of people who do. But, Tim didn't say that. So, as far as I see, I'd personally be happy to have Tim Bray write about me like this in public. [ ... 920 words ... ]

Added a scroller?

Just added a small script to the bottom of my weblog to run a scroll. Source:John Robb's Radio Weblog Not only that, but you added a scroller to my news aggregator page, too! :) Gah. While not as dramatic as Platypus Day, it does have me adding an item to my TODO list to more safely consume RSS in my aggregator. I feel like I'm tooling around the blogosphere with my pants off. And, it makes me want to get back to working on AgentFrank, so I can insert some filters to block JavaScript code that hijacks my status bar. Bah. No offense, since the message itself is worth attention, but scrollers are so... 1998. Update: And, John Robb has removed the scroller. Thanks! I still need to look into securing my aggregator though. Whether I like status bar scroller or not, my news aggregator should keep them out anyway. [ ... 151 words ... ]

Syndicating Whuffie

... there's excellent knowledge in blogs if only we had the tools to extract it. What sort of tools? Relevance and reputation based feeds and aggregators for one. The problem of quickly finding what's good from among the great muck of the blogosphere is, if you ask me, a far more urgent problem than seeing the correct authorship or harmonizing dc:date and pubDate before I even read the thing. ... facilitate P2P trading of RSS from desktop to desktop as well as server to desktop -- you subscribe to 1000 feeds, aggregate them, rate them (explicitly or by statistical filtering based on past use patterns) and then rebroadcast your new rated feed. Aggregators could then /use/ redundant items from feedback loops because each RSS source has a reputation rating that weights the contained individual item ranking; repeated items add their rankings. Source:TeledyN: Echos of RSS Yes. This is it. This is what I want to see come next from aggregators and blogs and syndication and all this mess. It's what I've been tinkering with in small steps for most of a year. It's what I intend BookmarkBlogger to facilitate, as well as AmphetaOutlines and the homebrew aggregator I'm hacking around with right now. At first thought, I'm not sure whether or not building and republishing RSS (or Echo) feeds is where it's at. But, the more I think about it, the more it seems perfectly elegant to me. All the elements are there, except for an extension to capture ratings. Extend aggregators to consume these rating-enriched feeds, and instead of just spooling the items up into your view, extract and assimilate the ratings into a growing matrix of rater versus rated. Apply all the various algorithms to correlate your rating history with that of others to whose ratings you subscribe. Mix in a little Bayes along with other machine learning. As for the interface... well, that's a toughie. At present, I think I could sneak ratings into my daily routine by monitoring my BookmarkBlogger use and watching the disclosure triangle clicks and link visits in my AmphetaOutlines based news aggregator. I could easily see adding an iTunes-like 5-star rating interface, but unless I get some pretty significant payoff from painstakingly rating things, I'll never use it. At least in iTunes, I get to have playlists of my faves automatically jumbled together, if I remember to use the ratings in the moment. The cool thing will be when sites like Technorati and Feedster start using these ratings, but the even cooler thing is when all that's on my desktop. This could be easy, though, couldn't it? What do we call it, Syndicated Whuffie? (Which reminds me: Eventually, we really gotta get back to the subscription problem. All these agents polling files everywhere will get to be nasty. Obviously. This has been talked about already, but little has happened. We need some ?PubSub, maybe some caches and concentrators. All stuff that's been mentioned in passing before, and left by the wayside as unsexy.) [ ... 1086 words ... ]