Preoccupations

RSS feeds: when is many too much?

Bill Burnham's posting (no permalink), 'RSS: A Big Success In Danger of Failure', with its conclusion that 'without the use of meta-directories and their standardized classifications and taxonomies the RSS community is in danger of collapsing under the weight of its own success', has attracted attention. It appeared in The Weekly Read (permalink), an on-line publication of Seed Capital Partners, an early-stage venture fund. The comments at The Weekly Read contribute to the debate, but of particular note elsewhere are Scobleizer (where Dave Winer has a comment) and Don Park (who agrees with Burnham). There are good postings, too, from David Galbraith, Jon Udell and Robin Good.

Other notable postings concerned with how to use RSS efficiently and intelligently include this from Nick Bradbury:

Before long, reading feeds starts to feel just like reading email - you look at each unread item just in case it's important, but most of the time there are only a few items that really interest you. Eventually it all feels like work, and you stop enjoying it. But this isn't email, folks - you don't have to care about every last item you receive in your feedreader, as long as your feedreader provides enough help. The most obvious way that FeedDemon helps is through its watch feature. A FeedDemon watch examines every incoming news item, but collects only the ones that contain specific keywords. This way you can subscribe to hundreds of feeds, yet only be alerted when one of those feeds contains something that interests you. ... FeedDemon's newspapers help even further by grouping news items. Although many people choose to read their feeds one at a time, others may prefer to use FeedDemon's group newspaper so that they can scan all items from a group of feeds at the same time. ... As more people become avid feed readers, the problem of managing all this new information will become even more important. I designed FeedDemon 1.0 with this in mind, and this will be a primary focus (if not the primary focus) of future versions.

Finally, there is this from Bob Wyman (of PubSub):

The solution to the problem comes through focusing on an often overlooked element which exists in many computer-based categorization or taxonomy systems. In Topic Maps, this element is the Subject-Indicator which is a URI that identifies a "Subject". A Subject is "anything that can be spoken about or conceived of by a human being." Topics, which are organized into Topic Maps or taxonomies are simply slots or labels that define the position of subjects within the taxonomy. Thus, one might have a subject such as Shakespeare's Hamlet, which is identified by the unique Subject-Indicator "http://example.com/Shakespeare/Hamlet" and a Topic "Plays.English" which is defined to encompass discussions that refer to the subject-indicator "http://example.com/Shakespeare/Hamlet". The important thing to notice about a subject-indicator is that it, like "subjects" in the real world, is not defined in terms of a taxonomy. Rather, the taxonomy is defined in terms of the subjects it covers. Of course, this maps to reality. We can have subjects of discussion even if we have no idea how to classify them -- which is pretty much the situation we're always in on the Internet... Even if we know how to identify a subject in one taxonomy, we often have no idea how to identify that subject in some other taxonomy. In fact, we usually have no idea what taxonomy will be used by our readers. Will they agree that Hamlet belongs in the "Plays.English" topic, or will they insist that it belongs in "authors.english.shakespeare.plays"? While there will be much debate about the topic, there will be much less debate about the subject. Hamlet is Hamlet. And, "A rose by any other name (or topic) would smell as sweet." If we can identify the subject or subjects of a posting in a taxonomy independent fashion, then any number of taxonomies can be defined which define the place of specific subjects within those taxonomies. It then becomes possible to ask for all items that discuss "Plays.English" or "authors.english..." and receive links to Hamlet without needing to translate between or agree on common taxonomies. The taxonomy which is used in a search becomes the choice of the searcher -- not something that the author of the searched-for text must agree to and reference in their text. Of course, some readers will recognize that this basic insight is not a new one. For instance, the "Easy News Topics" proposal that came from the ThreadsML discussion incorporated this insight as have other proposed systems. PubSub.com offers specific support for working with subject-indicators in its ability to subscribe to messages based on their "Referenced URI's". This facility, available on the advanced subscription pages for Weblogs and NewsGroups, allows a user to subscribe to only those new items that reference, either in the text or in hidden tags, any URI or URL that might be interesting to the user. Thus, it becomes possible for authors to insert "subject-indicators" into their postings and have others find discussions of those subjects simply by subscribing to the subject-indicator URIs. Others who wish to write on the same subjects can simply refer to the same subject-indicators in their postings and their messages will be easily found. One can then build taxonomies that define the classification of various subject-indicators. The result is the ability to search by topics without requiring the author of a posting to even know that the taxonomy exists. ... By focusing on the much neglected problem of identifying subjects in a taxonomy or classification independent fashion we can make it much easier to address the problem of classification. The key is to identify subject *in* the published item while dealing with classification *outside* of the item. Subjects should be globally identified while classifications should be determined locally, personally, or in a task-appropriate manner. Only in this way can we hope to be able to address the problem of classification without forcing everyone to accept the same classification scheme.

Digital age: music, film ...

W H Smith announces that it is no longer going to sell CD singles. The BBC invites feedback about how the internet is changing the way we listen to music. A US federal court rules that 321 Studios must cease making software that allows movie enthusiasts to copy DVD-Video discs; 321 prepare to take their case ('Defend your rights to backup DVDs') to the Supreme Court. And in another BBC report, we learn that 'Consumer video cameras are allowing film-makers to create award-winning films on tight budgets':

Friends star Courtney Cox was not fazed when she saw the consumer video cameras on the set of award-winning psycho thriller November. In fact, according to Director Greg Harrison, she found the whole experience refreshing. And his indie film's surprisingly low budget, just $150,000 instead of the $1-2 million low-budget movies usually cost, meant his backers at Indigent Productions were happy too. Mini-DVs are widely used nowadays in news reporting and for TV documentaries and some soaps. But November's award at the Sundance Film Festival for Excellence in Cinematography shows they have moved beyond the Blair Witch Project's rough, hand-held, natural light aesthetic into something more fitting for the silver screen. "I wanted to push the technology and not abandon a cinematic look," Greg Harrison told the BBC's Go Digital," and still work with colour and shadow and framing and lighting" to convey the tension in this psychological thriller.

Mediachest

Mediachest is attracting interest. MetaFilter calls it 'actually useful social-software' ('a sharing community for books, DVDs, and CDs. You can borrow your friends books and music and movies, and they can borrow yours.'). Boing Boing has a post from Michael Edwards (one of the team which developed Mediachest), part of which runs, 'Mediachest is a social software site that allows users to inventory their collection of physical media items and search the collections of their friends and friends-of-friends for items such as DVDs or books that they would like to borrow. The site facilitates the borrowing and loaning of these items in a similar way to how EBay facilitates online auctions — there are user profiles, feedback pages, and rankings. In addition to searching the collections of friends you are able to see the items of people that are geographically close to you, or that are members of groups that you associate with (such as a student organization, gym, or work place group).'

The Aula Point of View has a particularly striking post by Jyri Engeström (webpage):

As the cost of publishing the things you have and the things you want decreases linearly, the volume of non-monetary exchange (lending, sharing, donating things) will increase exponentially. ... In the coming years, blogging the products you own will be further simplified when barcode- and RFID-readers become embedded in cheap everyday handheld devices such as cell phones. I believe the resulting change in social behavior will not be just quantitative ... The shift to a blog-driven Web can set in motion a new, lively circulation of pre-owned products among networks of friends who play with the dynamics of social capital, not financial capital. Where Amazon pioneered the Web’s retail layer, and eBay pioneered the bargaining layer, a service like Mediachest could pioneer a new lending layer in product circulation. ... Some distinct characteristics of the emerging online lending layer: First, it is about retail products, but unlike Amazon, it is not about retail transactions. Rather, it’s about recycling, swapping, donating and borrowing (mostly) pre-owned products. Second, it’s about moving material goods, but unlike eBay, it doesn’t require national or global logistics. It’s about very local logistics — not the suburban neighborhoods as much as the trust-based interpersonal networks that inhabit every institution in our society: the workplace, the school, the sports team, the hospital, the university dorm. And third, it may not be about PC users as much as it is about mobile users (although that is contingent on the trend of more hackable mobile terminals). And finally, the emerging online small worlds oriented around non-money-based circulation of material objects might not at first reach many of the more affluent 30 to 40-somethings. But they are much more likely to reach their kids, or be originated by them.

Risks, responsibility and modern life

Malcolm Gladwell wrote the highly influential book The Tipping Point. He runs a website, gladwell.com, and writes for The New Yorker. His most recent essay, 'Big and Bad', is a terrific critique of Big Car culture — but it also has much to say about modern attitudes to risk and blame. It is well worth reading in full, but here are two excerpts. (Popiel is a vice-president of Millward Brown Goldfarb, in Toronto, one of the leading automotive market-research firms; Rapaille is a cultural anthropologist.)

Perhaps the most troublesome aspect of S.U.V. culture is its attitude toward risk. "Safety, for most automotive consumers, has to do with the notion that they aren't in complete control," Popiel says. "There are unexpected events that at any moment in time can come out and impact them — an oil patch up ahead, an eighteen-wheeler turning over, something falling down. People feel that the elements of the world out of their control are the ones that are going to cause them distress." Of course, those things really aren't outside a driver's control: an alert driver, in the right kind of vehicle, can navigate the oil patch, avoid the truck, and swerve around the thing that's falling down. Traffic-fatality rates vary strongly with driver behavior. ... with experience, we all learn how to exert some degree of control over what might otherwise appear to be uncontrollable events. Any conception of safety that revolves entirely around the vehicle, then, is incomplete. ... In psychology, there is a concept called learned helplessness ... We live in an age ... that is strangely fixated on the idea of helplessness: we're fascinated by hurricanes and terrorist acts and epidemics like sars — situations in which we feel powerless to affect our own destiny. In fact, the risks posed to life and limb by forces outside our control are dwarfed by the factors we can control. Our fixation with helplessness distorts our perceptions of risk. "When you feel safe, you can be passive," Rapaille says of the fundamental appeal of the S.U.V. "Safe means I can sleep. I can give up control. I can relax. I can take off my shoes. I can listen to music." For years, we've all made fun of the middle-aged man who suddenly trades in his sedate family sedan for a shiny red sports car. That's called a midlife crisis. But at least it involves some degree of engagement with the act of driving. The man who gives up his sedate family sedan for an S.U.V. is saying something far more troubling — that he finds the demands of the road to be overwhelming. Is acting out really worse than giving up? ...

On August 9, 2000, the Bridgestone Firestone tire company announced one of the largest product recalls in American history. Because of mounting concerns about safety, the company said, it was replacing some fourteen million tires that had been used primarily on the Ford Explorer S.U.V. The cost of the recall — and of a follow-up replacement program initiated by Ford a year later — ran into billions of dollars. Millions more were spent by both companies on fighting and settling lawsuits from Explorer owners, who alleged that their tires had come apart and caused their S.U.V.s to roll over. In the fall of that year, senior executives from both companies were called to Capitol Hill, where they were publicly berated. It was the biggest scandal to hit the automobile industry in years. It was also one of the strangest. According to federal records, the number of fatalities resulting from the failure of a Firestone tire on a Ford Explorer S.U.V., as of September, 2001, was two hundred and seventy-one. That sounds like a lot, until you remember that the total number of tires supplied by Firestone to the Explorer from the moment the S.U.V. was introduced by Ford, in 1990, was fourteen million, and that the average life span of a tire is forty-five thousand miles. The allegation against Firestone amounts to the claim that its tires failed, with fatal results, two hundred and seventy-one times in the course of six hundred and thirty billion vehicle miles. Manufacturers usually win prizes for failure rates that low. It's also worth remembering that during that same ten-year span almost half a million Americans died in traffic accidents. In other words, during the nineteen-nineties hundreds of thousands of people were killed on the roads because they drove too fast or ran red lights or drank too much. And, of those, a fair proportion involved people in S.U.V.s who were lulled by their four-wheel drive into driving recklessly on slick roads, who drove aggressively because they felt invulnerable, who disproportionately killed those they hit because they chose to drive trucks with inflexible steel-frame architecture, and who crashed because they couldn't bring their five-thousand-pound vehicles to a halt in time. Yet, out of all those fatalities, regulators, the legal profession, Congress and the media chose to highlight the .0005 per cent that could be linked to an alleged defect in the vehicle. But should that come as a surprise? In the age of the S.U.V., this is what people worry about when they worry about safety — not risks, however commonplace, involving their own behavior but risks, however rare, involving some unexpected event. The Explorer was big and imposing. It was high above the ground. You could look down on other drivers. You could see if someone was lurking behind or beneath it. You could drive it up on someone's lawn with impunity. Didn't it seem like the safest vehicle in the world?

Link via anil dash's daily links (19.2.04) and Jim Moore (Haravrd).

Countries you have visited

Online travel diaries are becoming more and more common. World66 allows you to build your own map of places you've visited. Mine are depressingly Northern and Western.

Create your own visited country map or write about it on the open travel guide.

Link via plasticbag.org

Atheism in RE?

The Government’s Qualifications and Curriculum Authority wants schools to teach less about Christianity and more about other religious and non-religious beliefs, from Islam to atheism. Mick Hume, writing in today's Times, comments:

I am an atheist of the fundamentalist, evangelical school. But teaching our children about atheism in Religious Education classes? ... This post-religious RE is about preaching the new State religion of multi-culturalism, or intolerant tolerance. All beliefs are to be treated as equally valid, and nobody is to be allowed a claim on the truth, or the right to offend anybody else’s faith. That dogmatic worship of relativism can only undermine the principle of any belief worth having, whether religious or secular. ... if there is to be RE in state schools, I would prefer my children to be taught full-on Christianity than offered a vapid pick-and-mix of multicultural spirituality. At least that would have the virtue of teaching them that there are such things as truth and commitment, and that some beliefs are worth fighting for. It would also give them certainties to react against. As our daughters, now aged five and six, grow up, I hope to teach them about the freedom to worship as they see fit — and the freedom to rubbish all religions without constraint. In the meantime, let them come home from school saying that they believe in Jesus. And let them read the beautiful King James Bible, rather than the gospel according to government quango and committee.

Will IT fail?

The article by Professor Eli Noam (Columbia) in FT.com, 'Market failure in the media sector', has attracted wide-spread publicity and BuzzMachine had an early, and excellent, post about it ('He's right that consolidation is a market reaction to this trend ... We will see the big get bigger, like supernovas exploding. But underneath them, we are seeing little guys grow on an entirely different scale. And that's where I think the professor is wrong: There is more demand for information and media than ever. The market is not collapsing. Yes, prices are. But so are costs. And so, some of this growing demand will be served in new ways.'). GigaOm today quotes this from Noam,

International phone call prices have dropped, and with internet telephony will move to near-zero. Web advertising prices have collapsed. Much of world and national news is provided for free. A lot of software is distributed or acquired gratis. Academic articles are being distributed online for free. TV and radio have always been free unless taxed.

and comments,

Missing the point, because in order to make a phone call, you need to have some sort of network and connectivity to the network. The value has gone from the call to the conduit.

Blogging, companies and PR

Blogging is an opportunity for Public Relations, not a threat. Blogging provides a unique means of providing your audience with the human face of your organization. Your customers can read the actual thoughts and opinions of your staff. On the flip side, consumers increasingly want to see the human side of your organization, beyond the corporate speak. PR Opinions

Link via Scobleizer

QRIO

It is the product of cutting edge artificial intelligence and dynamics technology. An entertainment robot that lives with you, makes life fun, makes you happy. Its name is QRIO. QRIO can gather information and move around on its own accord. QRIO not only walks on two legs, it can also manage uneven surfaces, dance, recognize people's faces and voices, and carry on conversation. QRIO is eager to be friends with people. ... QRIO uses body language and words to convey a feeling of intimacy; QRIO can connect to the Internet and share the kind of information you like to hear. As the world becomes progressively more complex, we thought how wonderful it would be to have a navigator that gently changes with the times.

Link via Scobleizer

TrackBack, PubSub and bi-directionalism on the web

Bob Wyman, writing at As I May Think, has made the case for TrackBack's great significance in overcoming a major shortcoming of the web:

TrackBack allows writers to build links from the blogs or items about which they write back to their comments. The technology exists in order to overcome a fundamental limitation of the web as we know it — web links are uni-directional. Thus, while it is easy to link from your blog to an entry in another blog and thus easy for readers of your blog to navigate to the other blog, HTTP provides no way for readers of the other blog to discover your link to that blog. For someone to be able to "trackback" from an item in one blog to all the other blogs that refer to it requires either the use of a protocol like TrackBack or a service like PubSub.com that builds the "back links" automatically.

This important posting goes on to make a number of points, including this about PubSub.com:

... the ability to subscribe to "Referenced URI's" offered by PubSub.com allows blog owners to see *all* references to their blogs — whether or not those who created the references were even aware of what TrackBack is. So, if you're trying to find out the full list of people who comment on your blog, the PubSub.com subscription is the best and easiest way to go. PubSub.com gives you "automated TrackBack" without requiring any work on the part of those who reference your site. You can even use our "automated TrackBack" to discover "trackbacks" to blogs that don't support TrackBack or to Web Sites, FTP files, etc. ... It should be obvious that what we've done here is much more important than simply automating a feature of blogs. What we've done is enabled the construction of a two-way, bi-directional web of links between blogs and from blogs to other web resources identified by URI's. Although HTTP only supports uni-directional, one-way links, PubSub.com basically "patches" in the back-links automatically to construct a bi-directional web of links. If you'd like to see the full web of sites that link into your blog, or other URI, all you have to do is ask PubSub.com to collect the back-links for you. To do that, use our "Advanced" Subscription page and create a subscription to the "Referenced URI" of your choice.

I would not have found Bob Wyman's posting had he not left a TrackBack to my earlier posting about ... TrackBack.