I would have considered this a third world country style event, but after California, New York and London what can I say? It's a small (dark) world...

The most obvious observation is that a lot depends on what kind of usage you do of your news reader and to what kind of sources you subscribe to.

In my case, for example, I live 12 hours a day in front of a computer. I check my news page almost once per hour. For users like me, the "all news in a page" / weblog approach is not bad, even subscribing to 160 feeds, since the number of new posts to read tends to be bearable and especially because we have developed the skill of scrolling trough pages very quickly and still spot relevant information.

This approach doesn't work very well if you are reading news only a few times per day: the amount of new stuff is too much and since you are picking up several hours of updates, you'd probably prefer to see them aggregated by channel rather than in sparse reverse chronological order, with all sources mixed.

At this point we are getting to how to organize feeds.

One popular approach is: let users group feeds how they prefer. MyRadio Tool and Kit allow this for Radio. NetNewsWire has a very nice "Combined View" feature that allows to have all posts (and not only titles) of a group visualized in a window. Very nice and fast.

Three panes display is also quite popular. It's how most email clients work. I think that it's good if you need to look back searching for some old post, it might also be good if you are not using very frequently. Personally I don't like the 3 panes approach because I'm lazy and I end up having to click too many times.

What other ways can we find to organize this content, both at authoring and reading levels?

Three approaches come to my mind:

• Channels/Categories
• Topics/Keywords
• Content-based filtering

A first approach is the use of channels when publishing. It's basically what most news sources already do: dividing contents by category (btw: this is what I think that the category element is for in the RSS 2.0 specs, but I might be wrong).

In other words, when publishing on a weblog or any other kind of site, authors could define their posts as part of a "channel", such as technology, politics, etc. Newsreaders able to parse this kind of information could provide users with additional tools to organize what they read. A shared taxonomy to define categories would make this process much more useful to the user.

Topics, or keywords, are a different approach. It's what we are working on (see ENT and K-collector).

The idea is to have a list of keywords shared among a group of users. The publishing tool will allow users to attach to their posts specific keywords, and aggregators will organize content according to these keywords. Keywords are also automatically attached to posts by different kind of filters.

I think that this approach has a significant advantage in k-logging environments, where the list of shared topics (which we are calling topicRoll) will not grow to match a full dictionary within days and where it's more important to be able to dig into the past content using a directory to navigate.

I don't know much about advanced content filtering. Bayesian Filtering seem a pretty interesting approach, also because it could be trained to find information relevant to use from other sources.

At evectors we are working on a reputation-based filtering system, where users of k-collector will be able to have their news filtered according to who is writing about some specific topic. It's still at a very early stage, but it sounds promising.

Whew... it looks like there's still a lot of stuff to invent and code to write, uh?

Another filter is routing messages that the server has marked as infected by a virus straight to the trash folder.

The spam filter is currently winning with 23 messages vs. 18 infected, but the second filter is gaining ground.

If I could visualize this with some cool graphic interface it would almost be entertaining.

As I have wrote earlier, I prefer the "weblog style" approach for my news reading rather than the 3 panes approach, it's way faster for me: I usually load the page and quickly scan headlines while scrolling down, until I get to a news I have already read. I do this almost on hourly basis.

But subscribing to a lot of professional news sources (meaning: not blogs) which are generating a lot of content ends up cluttering quite a bit this single page: it's becoming a little bit harder to track valuable information. A possible solution would probably be separating different kind of feeds in different pages (they should not be more than 2 or 3), maybe keeping blogs separated by other feeds.

Time to check the available aggregators once more and see if I find what I'm looking for.

Being able to store all my presentations in a standard xml format seems interesting, I already tried this some time ago with OPML and the RadioPoint Tool. This tool was somehow limited for my presentations, but Keynote is an excellent application. Hmmm...

I read today's world of the day on dictionary.com as a suggestion: what we should all try stop doing.

vainglory: Dictionary.com Word of the Day. vainglory [Dictionary.com Word of the Day]

Onward.

Dan Gillmor: One problem with the current crop of newsreaders is a sign of their youth. They assign equal weight to everything they display. So the headlines and text from Joe's Weblog get roughly the same display treatment as material from, say, the New York Times.

This is exactly what we are working on at the moment within K-collector. What we are trying to achieve is ranking based on topics. Most of the times is not only about who is writing something but about who's writing on some specific topic. I might find very interesting what somebody writes about technology but not, for example, about politics.

Thanks to topics embedded into RSS feeds via ENT, we have the basic necessary pieces. Now the challange is to make it useful and easy: a lot of people are not using filters to organize their email, so we can't expect them to have to set up complex filters to organize their feeds, it must be easy.

Btw: if you haven't visited our w4 beta site recently, you will find some interesting news. I especially like the new floating window in the topic view and the classifications pages organization. It definetly helps understanding where we are going.

Beta: Cross-platform rich text editor for Mozilla/Radio. The Radio/Mozilla wizzy editor I've been working on for the last couple of days is now in beta.
(I'm using it to edit this post -- yay!)

If you're comfortable running beta software, or if you're a Mac user who likes Mozilla and you're hungry for WYSIYG text editing for your blog, please help test the new feature by following the instructions in this message on the radio-dev mail list.

Don't forget to send an email to the list to let us know how it's working for you.

While the feature is in beta for Radio users, I'm going to be working on the Manila version. Since most of the code is shared, the Manila version will probably be released at nearly the same time as the Radio version, Murphy willing...
[Jake's Radio 'Blog]

Wizzy-Mozilla on the way for Radio. I've got WYSIWYG editing working in my copy of Radio running with Mozilla on MacOS X. It should work with Mozilla 1.3 or greater, on all platforms.

I'm using it right now to create this post. (Cool, heh?) Here's a screenshot.

In a lot of ways, it seems more powerful than the editor included with IE 5 and up (Windows only). For example, it's got multi-level Undo/Re-do, and it uses inline styles to do its formatting, instead of the rather ugly HTML that IE produces.

I'm planning on releasing a beta for Radio users later today. (Don't worry -- a Manila version will be close behind, since most of the code is shared.)

Happy. :-)
[Jake's Radio 'Blog]

Hey, it looks like posting features requests works!

Thanks Jake!

IMHO this is actually much more interesting than editing CSS files in Radio's outliner.

I see Radio as the "web embassy to your desktop". It can talk to the web (via XML-RPC, SOAP, HTTP, FTP, POP, SMTP), but it can also talk to your local applications, because unlike all other web apps, it runs on your desktop.

To edit our own content management system templates we have developed a Radio tool which download the template, converts macros to placeholders and allows you to edit html using any html editor. Once you are done all you have to do is save, the template will be compiled and sent back to the server, along with all its attachment (images, CSS, etc.).

But it can get much more interesting than that: you could edit any kind of content of your weblog using local specialized applications.

Creating a tool that allows you to edit on any image of your weblog simply by clicking it and having it opened with PhotoShop seconds later would be an easy task for Radio. Same thing for any piece of text (or, in perspective, audio or video).

So this could be my long term wish for UserLand: allow us to manage our weblogs on-line with Manila (doing it server side has some significant advantages), and use the full power of Radio to make integration with local applications a unique experience. I want to write with Word (or BBEdit, or anything different from the browser), edit my images with PhotoShop, organize my pictures with iPhoto, my appintments with iCal, but I don't want to spend my life uploading and downloading files.

PS: if this Radio/Manila integration could be done using some new or extended kind of open API which all developers could use, it could mean changing the world. Once more.

What I would like next? A renderer for Radio which replicates the easy to use "wiki punctuation" that many wiki apps use.

Ryanair profits grow by 12%. Europe's largest low-cost airline reports a 44m euro profit but suffers an increase in the percentage of empty seats on its flights. [BBC News | News Front Page | UK Edition]

I don't know how Ryanair can fly me to London for 29 Euros or less and be profitable. Actually... I don't care, I just hope they will continue.

I must admit that feature-wise I'm a pretty happy Radio user, it's a good blogging tool and a good development platform, it does what I need and much more.

Anyway, from what I hear supporting my Radio users and from what I hear around, here's what I think that would be interesting to do for Radio.

• Better images support: adding images to posts is a pain, especially for Mac users. Some kind of image tool that would allow to make image posting and management easier or to create nice pictures pages would probably help a lot of users to make their blogs more colorful (everybody has a digital camera today, and Radio is good at managing files, see below).

• WYSIWYG for Mozilla: Mozilla has some rich text editing support, which works both on Macs and PCs. It should not be incredibly hard to implement. Mozilla users are a minority, but with this feature enabled the number might grow for Radio users. Some alternative rich text editor solution (Flash? Java?) could be an alternative. Anyway it would be good to make text editing better and available to a wider audience.

• FOAF Support: FOAF is not wildly supported yet but apparently is gaining ground. A tool to edit my FOAF file and to add contacts to my network with one click would definetly make it more popular. Right now is mostly done by editing horrible rdf files with text editors.

• Leverage on the client side: afaik Radio is the only blogging tool which works client side. This can be a problem for some users (for example if you want to edit your site on the go), but it's a big advantage in many situations, where the integration with the local environment is important. Managing files on a weblog with Radio is just a matter of moving icons in folders, much better than everything else. Any feature that would leverage on this would make sense (i.e. images or files management, as suggested by Cristian).

HTH

1. Meetings. I went to a meeting with a friend who also has a powerbook (a 17", quite a long way from my 12"). In seconds we set up a local WiFi network and were taking notes in synch on an Hydra file. Very interesting.

2. Stuff sharing. I regulary use two Macs, a desktop and a powerbook. This means that about 50% of times what I need is on the other computer. Moving files around is easy with file sharing, but often what I need to move is just a couple of lines of html or a URL. I have started keeping a Hydra shared file permanently open on both macs and I paste there whatever I need to share. It works perfectly, highly suggested for all serial mac users.

And don't forget to check the real time web preview feature. This is the ultimate collaboration tool, really great stuff!