freeform goodness

tired: An “expert” complaining about the accuracy of a Wikipedia article in a blog entry.

wired: That same “expert” taking the opportunity to fix the inaccuracy himself/herself on the Wikipedia page, or raising the issue in the entry’s “talk” page.

:: Dave Walker 09:34 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/technology]
:: tags: technology wikipedia personalities

:: Comments (0)

“Apple lost their connect to their most loyal users when they killed the clones, that was the low point, and since then have steadily reconnected, although it’s doubtful if they even understand this.” — Scripting News

Not tackling the rest of the essay, but I couldn’t agree with this one less. Granted that this was 10 years and many brain cells ago, but my contemporary recollection is that the “most loyal users” were quite aware that the then-existing Mac OS licensing (cloning) program was causing the company to hemmorage money, and that to continue it as it was would have meant that there would be no Apple Computer company after some distressingly brief period of time. Fast cheap beige boxes with no operating system to run on them was the ultimate projected endpoint.

:: Dave Walker 17:55 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/technology]
:: tags: technology

:: Comments (0)

…or, as Mr. Pilgrim wrote, “blogging becoming an inaccessible, google-hostile bandwidth hog”

I can see where being able to take a few blogposts with you on your morning jog or plugged into the car radio during your morning commute might appeal, but I think there are better ways to spend that precious ear-time.

Otherwise, though, I find audioblog posts completely useless and annoying.

They’re attention-greedy

I can skim a written blog post, even a long one, in a few seconds and get a pretty good idea of what it’s on about. If it really tickles my fancy, I can sit down, read it in depth, and maybe even comment on it or link to it in a couple of minutes.

Audio posts are impossible to quickly review. If a person posts a 10 minute audio blog entry, to really get anything from it (meaning: to be able to comment on it meaningfully), you have to listen to the whole thing in sequence. Most people are lousy public speakers (myself included). They repeat themselves, they stumble over words, they clear their throats too much, they cough in your ear, they lose the plot and start to babble, whatever.

Stop it. You’re being greedy with the most precious resource the modern plugged-in person has these days: time.

Search-engine hostile

Not much to explain here. Search engines don’t index the sound of you harumphing and tapping your pen on your keyboard. Next.

Feedback hostile

Admittedly probably not much of an issue for the typical soapboxer, but taking part in conversational blogging (comments, trackbacks, Technorati follow-fu) relies on people having convenient chunks of text to quote, link to, and refute. Exactly how does anyone link to that bit during minute 17 of your audio post (after the donut sprinkles fall on the microphone but before the sound of your cat knocking over your spittoon) where you make some technical point that definitely, positively needs refuting?

I had many more words written for this post, but then I read Maciej Cegłowski’s audioblogging manifesto, which covered most of the salient points, so, unlike a lot of audiobloggers, I’m going to be brief and respect your time.

:: Dave Walker 08:12 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/technology]
:: tags: technology

:: Comments (5)

Robert Scoble: Why can’t you all use the XML icon?

• Ugly. Really, really ugly. Has anyone ever designed a site that looked better because it had a scrunched up, retangular orange turd with all caps, unkerned white Arial Bold sitting on it? I mean, really, orange and white?

• Inaccurate. Imprecise. Yes, syndicated feeds are XML. So are about a dozen other things you might reasonably find linked on a modern weblog.

• Bright orange screams “click me”, right? What happens if the user clicks it? Well, depending on what content type the feed is being served with, whether the publisher has styled the feed with XSLT or not, which browser the user is visiting with, and about a dozen other variables beyond the publisher’s and the reader’s control:

  1. The reader is presented with a screenful of unreadable gibberish, with redundant bits of the weblog content he was looking at just a second ago embedded in it. Reader thinks she’s broken something.

  2. The browser silently downloads the feed into the reader’s download directory, where it is instantly buried amongst the other 400 files already there, never to be seen again.

  3. The reader is presented with the same content on the weblog page, but styled differently. The reader thinks “what the hell was the point of that?”

Listen, I’m going to type r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w-l-y…

Feed autodiscovery is the only thing that makes sense.

If your aggregator can’t handle it, throw it out and get a new one. If your publishing software can’t handle serving it, join the rest of us here in the 21st century and get some software that does. If you need to serve multiple feeds (full content versus excerpts, or comments, or whatever), explain that inline (with, gasp, text) or on a separate “Feeds” page.

But for heaven’s sake, don’t try to shame the rest of us into foisting any more copies of that 36 x 14 abortion on the world.

:: Dave Walker 11:34 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/technology]
:: tags: technology

:: Comments (21)

• The World Wide Web Consortium injected itself into the syndication controversy by proposing that Atom seek standardization via the W3C process, rather than the IETF. This prompted a number of generally confused responses from various directions. The funniest, perhaps, was Robert Scoble’s, where he wondered why the W3C didn’t invite RSS as well. Um, just hazarding a guess, but…
• SixApart announced the licensing structure for Movable Type 3.0. People went kinda bats**t. The recent perceptible geeknoscenti move towards WordPress became a stampede.
• I’m still happy with Blosxom.
• Google started a corporate weblog, and for now it’s more corporate than weblog. There’s a feed for it too, which is currently Atom only, and of course that’s only a practical problem if one happens to use an unmaintained aggregator or one is allergic to free workarounds. They added image ads as an option for Adsense, but I haven’t seen one yet. They also launched Google Groups 2 as a beta. The two biggest features: new support for mailing lists (similar to Yahoo Groups lists) and the ability to read Usenet article summaries as Atom feeds. Still no sign of what I’d really like to see — providing Google web searches and Google News searches as feeds.
• Rogers Cadenhead, Andrew Grumet, and Adam Curry join Dave Winer on the RSS Advisory Board. Brent Simmons and Jon Udell leave, without comment. The number of non-Userland-affiliated persons on the board reaches zero, which is, seemingly, where it will stay. M’kay. OneCo?

:: Dave Walker 14:24 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/technology]
:: tags: technology

:: Comments (2)

edit: The Scripting.com validator has been revised and now works like the other validators running on the same codebase. Cool. Thanks.

Blogging format inside baseball. Skip this post if you have a life…

Here’s a great idea: take an existing, format neutral validator, remove functionality, add bugs (e.g. bogus non-well-formedness errors), and pass confusing information back to the users of the service (read the comments).

If you’re going to indulge in a pissing contest, you should be extra careful not to get any on your shoes.

:: Dave Walker 08:30 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/technology]
:: tags: technology

:: Comments (1)

Next time someone tells you that Atom should just adopt RSS as a feed format, or that underspecification is close enough for horseshoes and hand-grenades, or whatever, bonk ‘em in the gums with this. I wish I could have seen the full presentation.

:: Dave Walker 18:25 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/technology]
:: tags: technology

:: Comments (0)

Oh boy, one more god-knows-what listening for god-knows-who to send god-knows-what-unchecked-bytes to god-knows-which high port. Let’s not, and say we did, m’kay?

:: Dave Walker 09:34 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/technology]
:: tags: technology

:: Comments (0)

Once again, leave it to Sam Ruby to gracefully and succinctly provide some much needed moderation and wisdom amidst the sturm und drang.

In other Atom news, this looks terribly clever, though I really don’t have time to play with it now. One immediately apparent issue is that it doesn’t play unless you have client side XSLT happening in your browser, which rules out Safari and quite a few other browsers, but it looks like static rendering would be trivial to handle with an external script that called your favorite external XSLT engine from your language of choice.

:: Dave Walker 11:14 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/technology]
:: tags: technology

:: Comments (0)

All worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landings there. [+]

Subsequent work should happen in modules, using namespaces, and in completely new syndication formats, with new names. [+]

Hmph.

:: Dave Walker 21:29 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/opinion/technology]
:: tags: technology

:: Comments (0)