Library Stuff

As of 2:00PM EST, the word ‘Phish’ is number 9 on Daypop’s Top Word Bursts. Not only that, but my comments from yesterday are displayed. Neat!!

I just subscribed to the feed for Info Bite, which seems like an interesting weblog on RSS, Atom, Syndication, etc. It also looks like Antone has his own spec for syndication, with an chart on how it compares to RSS and Atom. I’ve said it before: I don’t care what they call it or what it looks like, as long as I can read it in my aggregator.

Joshua Allen writes:

“Now if you look at my RSS feed, it looks pretty.”

“Gina Venolia recently did some research on blog usage patterns, and found that many blog consumers never successfully make the transition to using an aggregator. One common thread in our internal discussions is that the orange XML icon is kind of geeky, and even if we get people to click on it, they often have no clue what all of that code is for. Julien Couvreur pointed out that there is no need for the RSS feed XML to look so unfriendly, and he’s been using an XSLT stylesheet to render nicely in the web browser.”

I’m on the fence with agreeing with Joshua here. Seeing the pure XML of content after clicking on the orange button scares some users. True. That’s why I always advocate for having an explanation next to the orange xml button saying something like “What’s this?” or “Learn more about RSS” with a link to a simple tutorial. Any good explanation will do. Also, I think Yahoo is also on the right track with their “add to My Yahoo” buttons.

I don’t think we need to change what users see when they click on the orange button. I just think we need to educate more on how to use it.

The concept behind CardFile is not new. Put all of your information in, get an RSS Feed, supply that feed to your friends, and when you want to notify anyone of any changes in your data, just change it, and it will be fed into the RSS Feed (or e-mail) and everyone who subscribes will know about it.

But, what I like about CardFile, (which was just sold, prompting this post) is that you can make certain information available only to your closest friends (partial v. full profile). Also, you control who can subscribe to the feed, which is nice. I’m thinking that there is a social networking aspect that needs to be tapped by the company that bought the software, but I can’t put it into words yet.

Speaking of social networking, why can’t I get an RSS Feed new messages in Orkut? That would be pretty interesting. Then again, that would mean that Google would actually have to acknowledge that RSS exists as a medium for content delivery, and we know that’s not going to happen anytime soon. They’re to busy alerting me of new results in the top 20 results of a web search via e-mail, of which I messengered off to a colleague today, “Big F’in Deal”!!!

Marc Cantor Writes

“Imagine a next generation MyYahoo service which enabled end-users to keep track of their personal (and their families) music, photo, video and file collections and provided them with home publishing capabilities to create, store and distribute their own content. Imagine a social networking environment which matched and found like-minded people and enabled them to participate in activities together (both on-line and in real space.)”

“Imagine a system that managed their Home LAN, devices, cell phones and videogames while providing a virtual file system to give them access to all of their content and data whether they were at home, the office or on the road. Imagine a communications and personal management system which enabled inter-personal interaction (sort of like groupware for humans) that assumed that all of these features and capabilities were built-in system constructs.

Now imagine all of these capabilities and features in one integrated environment focused in on a particular constituency, content brand or set of activities. That’s what we call a digital lifestyle aggregator (DLA.)”

Like Zoiks Scoob!!! I’ll bet Jenny is foaming at the mouth right now, thinking about how perfect this would be for her Treo. Me? I would love to be able to take all of my Grateful Dead and Phish shows, pictures of my daughter, and all that good stuff wherever I go. Of course, as was mentioned at the dead tech session at CIL right before I left, we need more space, and we need it cheap. So, DLA sounds great, in theory, but is it possible? I would think bit-torrent would have a big play in this, but I’m not convinced. Jenny and Marc would probably disagree…