Blogging talk at Inappropriate Tech

Neil: I like scripting.com because it winds me up every time I visit it.

Userland have made a change to Radio. Radio UserLand : More visibility in referer logs So now the RSS collection appears to come from something like http://frontier.userland.com/xmlAggregator?userWeblog=http://radio.weblogs.com/0001015/ Maybe I'm missing something here. Why didn't they just make it "http://radio.weblogs.com/0001015/" ? That way I wouldn't have to strip bits out before displaying it in a referer log.

Further to that last post, so what are the options for XMLRPC in .NET? There's nothing specifically mentioned on XMLRPC.

Another tiny RSS and RDF newsfeed viewer (with).NET source code [thanks, Markup World] to go with Aggie. The extraordinary thing about both of these is the tiny executable (33Kb and 50Kb) once you've downloaded the 20Mb of .NET CLR. There's a lot of support code in the CLR. If MS can keep the update process reasonable for the CLR and the price down on Visual Studio .NET, this could really help the development of 3rd party desktop apps. Now consider that SOAP support is baked into the CLR and you begin to get the MS Vision; "Program for the desktop, not the web". Lots of fat-client desktop apps running locally but using central resources via SOAP helps to keep the Windows OS entrenched.

With apologies to Eric Clapton and Leon Russell :
I knew all the time but now I'm gonna let you know:
I'm gonna keep on rocking, no matter if it's fast or slow.
Ain't gonna stop until the twenty-fifth hour,
'Cause now I'm living on meme power.

There's a curious thing happening in BlogSpace this week. We've got Blogdex tracking links between blogs; Google tracking related websites. Then there's the whole Radio Userland blog community generating lots of metadata around weblogs.com and the Radio Community Server. Some of this is open to all, while some of it is extracted from Radio users only. In particular they track all the RSS news headline channels that are read by Radio users. The next piece is the habit Bloggers have of building a "blogroll" of blogs they frequently read and posting it on the site as a set of links, often with links to the related RSS. And then there's people trawling their referer files and turning it into pages of backlinks.

Then something happened on May 30. Matt Griffith posted a suggestion about putting a link to the RSS for a page into the html of the page. Mark Pilgrim picked up on it and started evangelizing it. Within hours, people throughout the Blog community started implementing it. This leapt up the Blogdex and Daypop charts and spread like wildfire as people built support into all the major Blog CMS. Within a day people had started creating bookmarklets and other tools to take advantage of the new data.

Then one more latent meme got tossed into the mix to do with trying to find ways of navigating through the vast number of blogs. If we start mining all this data, maybe we can start at a weblog and explore it's neighbourhood in blogspace; all the blogs and sites that are "close" to this one. And so some new services were born. eg

Radio Neighbourhood and an example.

A Blogdex neighbourhood and an example

A Google Neighbourhood and an example

All this is certainly fun and it may or may not be important, but what I find fascinating is how fast it spread. From initial spark, to widespread adoption, to secondary code to exploit it, took 6 days. We used to joke about "Internet time" but this is getting ridiculous. But that's what you get when you're "Living on Meme Power"

OK. Who uses Outlook Express?

You *NEED* Quote-Fix http://jump.to/oe-quotefix

Please download and install it now.

Note this doesn't apply to Outlook users only Outlook Express. I'm still searching for an equivalent for you.

What it does is to fix Outlook Express' stupid quoting system for quoting text in replies and make it compliant with the dominant non-MS conventions that were around long before MS had an internet email
reader. Things like:-

1. Use a one line attribution
2. Wrap text at 72 chars
3. Use > as indent on quoted text
4. Put your Sig at the bottom with "-- " as a sig seperator
5. Auto-remove Sigs before quoting

As a side benefit it colours quoted text so it's easy to see what text was quoted and written by whom and what text is new.

If you like it, please pass it on to other OE users that you know.

And if you haven't read it yet, you might want to check out my rant "Coping with mailing lists using Outlook (Express)" One question I have to ask is why this was even necessary. Microsoft should be doing this as a matter of course or at least offering it as an option in the standard package.

Aaron is putting together a comprehensive index of weblog coverage of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference. [thanks, Hack the Planet] This is well worth digging into as there were an amazing collection of people and ideas there.

A graphic example of why the mainstream news outlets serve no useful purpose any more. How many slavish clones of the press release can you see in this Google Search: "illegal copies of Star Wars"

Progress on tcp.im  ... Progress on tcp.im  [thanks, Scripting News] WS (SOAP, XMLRPC etc) protocols over IM has enormous potential not least because it can indirectly address any machine out there, neatly bypassing our NAT and firewall problems. This is going to open up all sorts of possibilities as finally we'll be able to more or less guarantee that when we need a call back, the other machine will be able to talk to us. It's great to see several initiatives working on this around Userland, Jabber and AIM.

As always there's some downsides. First the IM market is fragmented, which means we really need support for MSN, AIM, ICQ as a minimum. Just a SMOP right? Then we have a bigger issue about async, non blocking code and some assumptions built into the RPC view of WS. IM generally assumes that both parties are online and that messages flow from one to the other more or less instantly. But this is not necessarily true. Apart from inherent latency, some IM systems support a store and forward model more like SMTP. If we go into this with the RPC mindset then IM will be treated just like http and we'll write lots of code that assumes an immediate response. The code we write will be blocking and will sit there waiting for the response until timeout. Wouldn't it be better to take notice of the "messaging" part of IM and deliberately build this as a message queue architecture instead of an RPC architecture? There's some good work being done on SOAP over SMTP and IM is enough like SMTP that we should be able to use a lot of common code and effectively bring on both at once with common entry points. 

Now the SOAP SMTP spec suggests using the existing SMTP message IDs and in-reply-to headers to provide the control over which message refers to which call. But of course IM doesn't implicitly have any of this with different implementations across different IM systems. It's going to look more and more unfortunate that IM is a proprietary protocol mess with competing standards rather than IETF RFC driven sanity like smtp, pop3, irc, nntp, http et al. 

WS over IM is indeed a mind bomb. But watch out for the gotchas.

EU to tax e-commerce with the US As a good EU VAT payer, I laughed at this until I realized that this would affect me. Voidstar is hosted with a US hosting company and paid via credit card. From July next year, I'll either be chucked off because they haven't registered in an EU country or have to pay VAT. I can understand the reasoning but I also can't imagine how this is going to work.

05/02/02 21:07 CEST A new blogging company.As covered in Microcontent News, Nick Denton, co-founder and former CEO of Moreover (not to mention venerable British blogger) has announced his new venture, which is going to address, in his words, the "need to make weblogs more accessible: to turn them from a cult phenomenon into mainstream media, without corrupting the form." Of course, it'll only be an 80% company. [thanks, EVHEAD [via News Is Free]]

Go live is early 2003. Come on dude! What happened to Internet time? Or is the wait because he only wants to work a 4 day week?

Hell hath no fury like a FriendReunited. Well it made me laugh anyway.

O'Reilly Network: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Decepticons [May 01, 2002] : How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Decepticons

Alan Cox attacks the European DMCA Wake up call [thanks, The Register USA] If you thought the DMCA was bad, just look at what the EU is cooking up to try and keep us in line.

Ben Hammersley is writing the O'Reilly book on RSS. Content Syndication with XML and RSS

The Internet is for everyone. RFC3271 Even Martians.

Need To Know 2002-04-26 presents Michael Greene's Grammy speech "The Insidious Virus of Illegal Music Downloading" turned into a rockin' Drum and Bass track. RIAA, We Love You That's a big shout to DJ C0ntaX for that one.

The England World Cup footie saga is a laugh isn't it? First it's Beckham's foot, now it's Sven's dick! Simon Barnes in the Times had it right. Ulrika-ka-ka-ka Johnsson "If she was a tennis tournament she'd be the Swedish Open"

There's a debate going on about programming approaches to Web Services that allow them to be extensible and not brittle. There's one solution that I whole heartedly support. "Use named params. Ignore parameters you don't recognise. Default parameters that are not passed". This is what we did with CGI and in that environment it just works. It allows WS developers to add extra parameters to server code later without breaking existing clients. It allows servers to drop parameters when they're no longer needed. It allows clients to call the WS when they don't have all the data required. 

But unfortunately several server toolkit implementations break if a full set of parameters are not supplied. And it forces a particular style of encoding in XML-RPC that is supported but isn't obvious in the spec. There seems to be a mindset here that equates WS programming with local object programming in compiled languages. It may even be inherent in the "Obect Access" initials part of SOAP. Dynamic Scripting languages like PHP and perl have understood this for years.

If you hard code the WS call as a fixed list of required parameters and break when they're not all there or an extra one is present, you're storing up problems for the future.

Great speech from Bruce Sterling. Viridian Note 00309: CFP 2002 Speech : "Where do you want to go today, Mr. and Mrs. America?" "Hey, I want to cruise in Steve the Dell Dude's borrowed convertible, playing borrowed MP3s!" "But no no NO, that's not what we meant! We meant, where do you want to go today, to GIVE US SOME MONEY."