umberto eco entschleunigt die krieg-und-frieden-rhetorik.
i've already heard the things eco writes in my social circles. which doesn't qualify eco's writing but certainly qualifies my surrounding.
finally, an up-to-date and quite good resource about rss: "how to syndicate web site news through rss feeds technology".
it contains a reference to another just-as-fresh article called "rss – lo-fi content syndication" which denotes some issues to look out for when providing rss feeds.
one of these is about bandwith and i think this will become (or probably already is) the crux: the idea of having a news aggregator on each desktop makes one single rss feed being fetched as often as there are subscribers which will be killing any lo-fi weblog (which might sound tautologic in most cases).
and it won't be enough to take etags and 304 responses into account. it will need a few centralized rss aggregator "backbones" that get a ping of each rss feed when it has changed. (not having said that decentralisation is a bad thing, generally. not at all. i just doubt that it will be working with news syndication.)
that leads me to my own little project called parss which should already be running on my new server. it's just that latter is still waiting to be moved to the right place in the flat where its noisy fans don't disturb my sleep.
so apologies for still teasing only (especially to chris), the time will come.
but i digress. parss, however, can do all of the things mentioned above. it has an xml-rpc interface that can handle rss pings, addition of and certainly request for feeds. it respects etags and its goal is to minimize the fetching-rss-by-time-based-guessing method.
furthermore, there is an antville module that connects this wonderful publishing software with a parss server and provides user-defined as well as merged feeds. uh, and karma voting. and direct-post™ technology, heheh...
did someone already fill rss feeds into an rdf database as envisioned by dan libby?
anyway, good history lessons. is the ominous futures document the holy grail the rss community desperately is longing for?
reading the music they play on the radio: fm4 track service.
speaking of: blackmustache's “ride the fence” is today’s fm4 webtip, “a flashbased musicvideo to a hip-hop call to increased political activism. righteous slamming of the powers that be brilliantly interpreted into a visual medium”. pretty groovy.
"spotte nicht über kriminalromane! sie sind heutzutage das einzige mittel, vernünftige ideen unter die leute zu bringen." – friedrich glauser, "tee der drei alten damen".
"eins zwei drei vier fünf sechs sieben acht." – kraftwerk, "nummern".
probably really everything you might want to know about rss/rdf is contained in an extensive technology report at xml.coverpages.org.
btw. i came to the conclusion that you get even better results in finding out something about rss when using a search term like headline syndication. which is a much better definition for what it's all about, anyway.
bof!
dan gillmor: "google buys pyra - blogging goes big-time".
or: why google fucking loves weblogs.
statement of audience
i realize that nothing i say matters to anyone else on the entire planet. my opinions are useless and unfocused. i am an expert in nothing. i know nothing. i am confused about almost everything. i cannot, as an individual, ever possibly know everything, or even enough to make editorial commentary on the vast vast majority of things that exist in my world. this is a stupid document; it is meaningless drivel that i do not expect any of the several billion people on my planet to actually read. people who do read my rambling, incoherent dumbfuckery are probably just as confused as i am, if not moreso, as they are looking to my sorry ass for an opinion when they should be outside playing frisbee with their dog or screwing their life partner or getting a dog or getting a life partner. anyone who actually takes the time to read my bullshit probably deserves to ingest my fucked up and obviously mistaken opinions on whatever it is that i have written about. – why i fucking hate weblogs (found via spülmittelmut).
one can tell immediately that cascading style sheets didn't make web design a better but even worse place, instead, by only taking a cursory look at how people desperately tweak around just to make current browsers display the same font size.
however, some wicked and fresh css resources: the selectoracle translates stylesheets into plain english or spain language; peter paul koch's css 2 tests (also available for javascript); different meaning of font sizes with excellent, though not up-to-date browser screenshots for comparison.