Cristian Vidmar: I'm curious: how many channels do *you* aggregate?

Frank Paynter interviews David Weinberger. A very good interview, absolutely worth reading when you have some time.

At some point ENT is mentioned:

The last time I looked, Paolo Valdemarin and Matt Mower - both of whom I not only respect but really like - were expecting users to categorize what they're writing according to some accepted taxonomy; I'm pessimistic about getting users to take that step. But if it works, it'd be fabulous and I totally support it.

I must say first that I really like David too. I'm looking forward to meeing him again somewhere in the world hopefully soon.

Then I'd like to say that when we first presented him the whole idea of ENT and K-collector in Vienna at BlogTalk 1.0, we did notice the skeptic look in his eyes and we have been working to solve this problem.

While at the very beginning we were expecting all users to use our tool to add topics to what they were writing (even back then we were trying to help users by suggesting appropriate topics for their posts), the system has evolved since then in a few ways.

What we are doing is separating the process of topics creation from the actual association of topics to content. While the possibility of adding topics to posts still exist and it's the best way of doing it, there are also other ways of associating content and metadata,

The first one is TopicMatching, which allows us to add topics to posts streaming through our servers automatically. Visiting our open w4 site, you will be able to see content from about 100 weblog grouped using topics created by about 15 "active users" (users with the k-collector client). In other words we are leveraging on the work of a few people to categorize a vast amount of content.

We are also investigating other ways of creating topics on our site. For example by analyzing words used in search engines that brought users on our sites. There are also other options we are testing which will allow to improve the results.

It's true, we have not resolved the whole problem, but we are definetly listening :-).

This morning I remembered reading, when I was a kid, a short novel (maybe by Asimov) about a guy in a not so distant future who had been selected as "the voter". Computer technology and had evolved so much that a computer could simply make the decision about who should rule the world. A super computer (the Multivac if it was Asimov) could do all the statistical analysis necessary and decide, it only needed the input from a single human being.

The good news is that we didn't get to this point, the bad news is that we are not so far.

We don't have a single voter, but we have a single country electing a person who can significantly impact the whole world: the United States of America.

Most Americans don't seem to realize this; to the contrary they often seem to be one of the democratic peoples less aware about what's going on in the rest of the world.

I've just spent about half an hour video chatting using iChat with my dad. No big deal, we do this all the time. But he is not at home now, he's on a broadband connection in a quite fancy hotel costing the equivalent of Eur. 69 per night.

Now he's going to sleep, maybe drinking a Heineken from the mini bar (Eur. 2,8) before and watching a movie on HBO or some news on CNN.

My dad is in Shenzhen, People's Republic of China.

PS: he just tried to comment this post but he couldn't reach UserLand's comment server. It might be censored. Or maybe is simply a dns problem. :-)

If you liked the quick and easy way windows float around your screen with the latest MacOS X feature, you'll love the 3D desktop environment Sun is working on: Looking Glass. [via The Scobleizer Weblog]

In his this morning's rant on RSS, Dave mentions polling frequency for aggregators and the usual pull vs. push issue. My opinion as an application developer is that the beauty of RSS is that it's not instant. Current aggregator users simply don't expect a post to appear in their aggregators instantly. Having to wait on average 30 minutes (considering the traditional hourly scan) is a perfectly acceptable delay; it might be different on intranets but usually intranets don't have bandwidth limitations.

Developing an application which does not require instant feedback allows to scale it in a much nicer way: backend agents can be set up to routinely perform tasks, update pages, find relations, ping profiles and do all kind of activities without any hurry: we always have an hour to go.

For our own k-collector aggregator we took a slightly different approach to the hourly scan: all feeds are polled within one hour, but not all of them are scanned at the same time. The aggregation activity is dynamically scattered in the whole hour, granting prompt updates but preventing the usual processor and bandwidth spikes triggered by hourly scans (active users with a Radio or a MovableType client ping the server when they update, meaning that their posts get on the site quicker).

I do understand why somebody would want to make RSS as quick as email or instant messaging but it would need radical rethinking of the current approach and infrastructure, for example downloading RSS using something like bit torrent, spreading the overall bandwidth usage on clients and not only on servers.

PS: I do like the name RSS... but since I'm a nerdy user who has been using this name for years my opinion doesn't count much. Compared to HTTP, "html" or "tcp/ip", RSS seems a reasonably easy name for everybody to use and remember. Marketing wise I would probably change the orange XML icon from "XML" to \"RSS" (I understand why it reads XML, but it's probably a little hard to explain to the everyday user).

Robert Scoble wrote two interesting posts last week about blogs comments and group weblogs. I think that we are ready to move to the next step with comments and group weblogs.

Comments are a very useful feature on weblogs but I think that they should be decentralized: in other words I would like comments I write on other weblogs to be saved on my own weblog. The main reason for this is that I would like to know what my favourite webloggers write on all weblogs not only on their own, this would give us a far better understanding of what's going on.

Trackback is a first step in this direction but it has problems, the main one is that I can't read a thread of comments in a trackback window because only the first few characters of the posts are reported there (trackback seems to come from the same kind of thinking that decided that RSS feeds should not contain full contents, which is something I hate but which is an entirely different rant).

What I would like to see is a comment window which looks exactly like current ones (i.e. you can read the whole thread without having to click on any link), but where the content is actually syndicated from the weblogs of each comment's author.

In a lot of cases I might not want a comment I make on some other guy's weblogs to appear just as a regular post here, I would probably prefer to have them stored in a separate category (easy to do with Radio), but still they would have to live here, not scattered on hundreds of other sites.

Something similar applies to group weblogs: each author should publish in their own space, the group weblog should only be a front end aggregating related contents from several different sources.

I believe that the work that is underway on RSS categories and topics will be an important step in this direction, there will be soon an entirely new class of applications based on RSS and new kind of aggregators.

I think that we are ready to declare 2004 "Year of RSS".

Dave has changed the banner on Scripting.com with a picture he took in Venice when he visited us. We took a water taxi from Piazza San Marco to the train station. It's an expensive thing to do, even if I live one hour from Venice I had never done it. It was really beautiful.

I also like this new thing on Scripting.com about changing the banner picture. My friend Cesare has been doing something similar for a while (and his cool CSS template scales the image with the window size).

I guess I'll join the party soon.

Update on Star Wars and Photoshop. At least a hundred (well, OK, 30) of you wrote to say that the MacWorld story about Photoshop's relationship to Star Wars is bogus. Here's a link, decide for yourself.

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

The original story didn't sound right to me as well. This one sounds better. Back then the BarneyScan scanner (the first product to use the application which later become PhotoShop) was distributed in Italy by my parents' company. The scanner was okay, one of the very first scanners for 35mm slides, but the software was great (I'm not even sure it was called PhotoShop back then). The option to manage multiple 8 bit channels and to be able to create selections from these channels was revolutionary and allowed to achieve amazing results long before Adobe introduced layers.

The only problem was that the software did not start up if the scanner board was not plugged in the NU-bus of the Mac II. I clearly remember that back then I was always travelling with a suitcase containing a 20Mb hard disk and the BarneyScan card.

Reading the linked article I also found out that I'm one of the first 200 PhotoShop users. Cool. Do I win something?