You have probably read the news on several weblogs: British Pathe is putting on line 3500 hours of historical newsreels.

I'm downloading right now a few minutes of footage regarding Gorizia and Trieste (the towns where I live) and it's quite exciting. The only problem is that you can either get them free at a very low resolution, of for 50 Pounds at a nice resolution and with the license to use those contents for one year.

I don't want to use them, I only want to see them at a good resolution. How about a subscrition that would allow me to do that?

Anyway, the site is worth a visit.

"Yea, no prob Em. So what's going on out on the wild wild web today?"

"Oh, not much, Google says only 12.945 million pages have been updated today, quite slow, but fridays always are." With the size of the web surpassing 50 billion pages last year it became much more effective for webservers to just ping Google when a page updated than having Google have to crawl the whole thing every couple of months.

So this is my first "on this day next year post".

December 25th, 2003

It has been a very interesting year: the most important thing is that somehow the world managed to prevent yet another war in Iraq and there is a little more peace everywhere now.

The new Yahoo-Inktomi search engine has created an alternative to Google and we have seen many new services in search technology sparked by this new competition (one year ago almost 90% of the search engine traffic was managed by Google, believe it or not it was almost a monopoly).

A lot of old and new friends have introduced new and exciting products (Radio 9 rocks!), making everybody's life a little easier and making the web a far more interesting and open space to explore. Our own k-collector system is doing fairly well.

Everybody is in good health, after a few months some friends have dropped their strange "only this and that" diets, they might have gained a few pounds back but they are enjoying their life.

WiFi had become ubiquitous, I'm posting this message from my PowerBook right in the middle of a square and I have plenty of bandwidth to play with... I guess that I will jump on the new Jet Segway that I found under my Christmas tree and fly home.

One year ago: Unlike many other respected webloggers, I cannot post a "on this day one year ago" message since I opened this weblog in March '02.

So this is my first "on this day next year post".

I find that it's an excellent idea and I added the banner to this blog but... how does it apply to the rest of the world? I mean, I'm Italian, my site is in Italy, part of the work I do is in Italian. The intent of the licenses is very clear (I did not try to read the legalese version) so I could expect anyone to understand how I would like the content of this site to be used, but I think that copyright laws might slightly differ from country to country.

Remember, this is the web, there are no borders. Any "bloggin'lawyer" who could shed some light on this issue out there?

The reason we are doing this with RSS 2.0 and OPML is that Radio is the blogging tool that we choose for our k-loggin application and Radio already does RSS, and OPML is the format that we alrady use server side with IdeaTools to manage complex sites directories. So what we have to do is "just" tie this two pieces of existing code together to achieve what I described.

This said, I'm very open, for example, to have IdeaTools write or read RDF or XTM or any other of other format to develop compatibility with other existing applications, just like we already support XML-RPC, SOAP and open APIs to interface our application with the rest of the world.

We are not trying to reinvent the wheel with different standards, we are simply developing a new way of using our technologies that we believe will be helpful to our current and future customers.

I agree on the fact that OPML directories are a very interesting part of the development of content/knowledge management systems.

I think that a particulary interesting application of this technology are self-building directories. This is what we are working on with Matt and with his LiveTopics Radio tool.

It's somehow similar to what Dave describe as "timeless weblog", but instead of routing each post to one node, it will do it to several nodes in different categories and, most of all, it will be based on a server-side RSS 2.0 parser, so it will be able to organize contents from several k-logs.

What we are working on is the automatic creation of a directory containing knowledge maps based on the topics attached to each post. The main use will be k-logging, but we are already seeing other intresting applications. Stay tuned.

Ok, so I have picked my Creative Commons License, added the banner and the disclaimer. Now you can keep doing what you have always done with this site and be relatively sure that I won't sue you.

Internet Explorer just crashed on my MacOS X Jaguar G4, and in the log of the console that popped out, with the usual application error notes, I also found this:

Wearly I sit here, pain and misery my only companions.

Pardon me for breathing, which I never do any way so I don't know why I bother to say it, oh God, I'm so depressed.

Would you like me to go and stick my head in a bucket of water?

Do you want me to sit in the corner and rust, or just fall apart where I'm standing?

My capacity for happiness, you could fit it into a matchbox without taking out the matches first.

I'm not getting you down at all, am I?

Funny, how just when you think life can't possibly get any worse it suddenly does.

Ha, but my life is a box of wormgears.

Funny, how just when you think life can't possibly get any worse it suddenly does.

I wander which application is writing this stuff in my log...

Check out the 2003 Demotivators® collection at Despair.com.

Now, this is a conference I would probably like to attend to! There's only one missing detail: money. I mean, there's quite a lot of very smart and bright people at the moment that would hardly be able to afford the investment. So we need to figure out how to solve this little detail (sponsors?). Okay, okay, I can cover my travel expenses, but I'm not going to pay $1K or more to attend

This morning something in my referers page took me to the google's labs site. Both the Google viewer and the Google webquotes seem quite interesting new ways to exploit their database.

Definetly a site worth visiting and keeping track of (I'm building an RssDistiller filter for it right now )

PS: I wrote this before checking my news aggregator... it's all over the place this morning, including the two top positions on DayPop. There was no trace of this when I went to sleep 9 hours ago. Oh...well...

For some reason, reading Jakob Nielsen's last alertbox reminded me of Apple's Knowledge Navigator video: it did looked like magic then. A vision of the future more than 15 years old. Check it out...

I have just subscribed to technorati.com to get my Link Cosmos as an RSS feed. Interesting service, but I still have to understand if it's worth $10 per year.

Anyway, I think that the real news here is that for the very first time I'm paying to get an RSS feed into my aggregator. Here's an interesting excercise: go trough the feeds you are currently subscribed to, how many would you pay for?

Sjoerd asks why files.xml isn't directory.opml. [Scripting News]

FWIW, I think that it should be an opml file too. Can't we have both?

Hopefully he will get his share of spam...