Category: Internet

Real Live Preacher confesses

Lots of interesting stuff in my RSS aggregator (my backup airplane reading), including this little tidbit from Gordon Atkinson of San Antonio, Texas, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church… and Real Live Preacher:

So here we are. After eighteen months of anonymity it is time to come out of the closet. I guess the thing to do is just say it, so here goes.

My name is Gordon Atkinson. I live in San Antonio, Texas, and I’m the pastor of Covenant Baptist Church.

Yeah, Baptist. I know; I can hardly believe it myself. Real Live Preacher a Baptist? How can this be?

It be.

He also writes that the cover of his book and its publication dates are coming Friday. Can’t wait.

Camera closure

I think it’s a sign of my impending breakdown that buying and breaking in a camera is turning into a neverending saga. This is post #5 on the topic. When we last left our hero in Post Four, the camera had been purchased in a convoluted transaction that involved goat sacrifice and a temporary dispatch note.

Cut to yesterday, the purported day of the Delivery of the Camera. Lisa called after getting home to say that UPS had left a notice at our door about a package requiring signature. You’ve got to be kidding me, I said. Nope, she said, and here’s the InfoNotice number. I went to the UPS site and requested a same day hold. They promptly called me back to let me know that the van with my package would be back at the depot by 6:30. Could I pick it up between then and 8?

To understand why I gritted my teeth when I responded, you have to understand the following:

  1. The UPS depot is a mile beyond the end of Rt 520 off Avondale Road, nominally not far from my office, but a great bloody long way during rush hour when half the population of Microsoft and related industries are all leaving 520 to the east into one of two tiny little stoplight choked Redmond streets.
  2. Our dogs’ day care place is also off Avondale Road, about two miles further up—about 25 minutes drive from our house if there aren’t any accidents.
  3. I was scheduled to pick up the dogs at 5.
  4. Since I couldn’t pick up the package until 6:30, I was guaranteed two long outings to Avondale Road in the same evening.

Anyway, I finally made it and brought the camera home. But as a result of all the hijinx, I haven’t been able to do more with the camera than verify that it works. I’ll try to post some pictures while we’re in Boston.

Source that post!

Via Micro Persuasion (another really excellent new blog find): Blog Sourcing Petition. This is fundamental to one of the promises of the blogosphere, that individuals gain power through using their voices on line. But if you don’t link, you don’t participate in that empowerment.

I’m sure I’ve been guilty of not sourcing in the past, and I’ll probably make mistakes going forward, but I’ll try harder in the future.

Bill Gates: blogging and RSS “very interesting phenomenon”

Microsoft Watch published notes on a speech Bill Gates (my überboss) gave to the Microsoft CEO Summit. In the speech, which was webcast externally, he talked about technology empowering individual users, and highlighted weblogs and RSS:

Gates called blogging and the RSS Web content syndication service a “very interesting phenomenon.” He suggested that by using RSS as notification system, customers can “get the information you want when you want it.”

Sounds like a positioning statement to me.

Manila 9.0.1 now available; cosmos links supported

Manila 9.0.1 has been released. While ostensibly a bug fix release, it adds some cool new features that I’m looking forward to playing with.

One feature is particularly cool because I asked for it sideways smiley. The new encodedPermalinkURL macro for news item templates enables constructing Technorati Cosmos links like the ones on Boing Boing. Kudos to the UserLand team for being responsive. (Incidentally, asking for new features on one’s blog is less productive than asking for them on the manila-dev mailing list.)

Update: Well, my site now has Cosmos links for every post, but now the query into Technorati seems to return a bunch of garbage. Oh well. One step forward…

Why RSS is succeeding where CDF failed

I’m the first to say that this meme of “RSS in 2004 equals push in 1996” is full of crap. However, a recent (last month. I’m a little behind, OK?) post from Don Box points out some funny prior art in the form of CDF, Channel Definition Format, an XML based syndication format with a <Channel> element containing a bunch of <item> elements. CDF was Microsoft’s response to the “push” bubble, which featured such wonderful business models as PointCast (remember them? screensavers with headlines, clogging your network in real time! and it’s free!).

Do you remember CDF? Only Internet Explorer (which does something with the format, though I’m not clear what) and Don (and Mark Pilgrim) do. So why is RSS succeeding where CDF failed, in spite of infights, name calling, confusing branding, incompatible version forks, and big hairy egos? ITWorld doesn’t know, and Wired’s best guess is that it survives despite itself because it’s useful.

I think that RSS succeeds where push and Pointcast (and CDF) failed because the value proposition is even stronger than it was seven years ago. The rise of weblogs means that there is a ton of interesting stuff out there that’s impossible to read if one only relies on the browser and bookmarks. The rest of the content of the web has gotten smarter, too, and most of the major publishers have automated back end systems that can easily put out information in other formats than Web-ready HTML. The Web is much more XML friendly than it was in 1997; every current operating system and browser groks XML at least at a fundamental level.

Finally, RSS isn’t owned by a big company. To the extent that it has owners, they are all the content authors, aggregator developers, and readers who have invested time and energy in making it work for them. That’s a community.

Camera follow up

As I had hoped (go go mini-Lazyweb), posting about my camera consideration brought some good feedback from readers. Paul Strasma suggested in a comment that I was undervaluing optical zoom as a feature, and after some thought and research I think I agree with him (unless I want to continue to limit myself to taking pictures of flowers, which are about the only images that work well from one of my two existing solutions). George agrees and suggests that megapixels aren’t everything, provided you’re careful with your composition. One can, after all, take a 1600 by 1200 pixel picture with a 2.0 megapixel camera, which would be more than sufficient for web publishing and most print work that I can imagine myself doing.

Returning to BestBuy.com, it appears that there is a camera that makes that precise trade-off. For the same price as the Olympus that I was considering, which is a 3.0 MP camera with digital zoom, I could pick up the Nikon CoolPix 2200, which has 2.0 megapixels and optical zoom. It’s coincidentally the little brother of the model that Paul was considering and has the same one-hand ergonomic design. Unfortunately my local Best Buy doesn’t have it, so I would have to order it sight unseen…

Two web apps, two blogs, two stories

One of the things that I wasn’t able to blog earlier this week was Google’s first official corporate blog, named the GoogleBlog (I guess I’ll have to call Aaron’s unofficial version the Google Weblog to keep them straight). The blog managed to stay out of controversy for one post. Mark Pilgrim and others observed that in the second post, which discussed Google’s offices around the world, a paragraph about outsourcing in Bangalore mysteriously disappeared.

This was a fairly foolish thing to do on several levels. First, what was Google thinking in the first place by starting an official corporate weblog during the quiet period before their IPO? Second, redacting an entire paragraph of content which was, frankly, not that controversial in the first place seems foolish if one is seeking to establish a legitimate weblog.

And it’s really not much of a weblog, either. No bylines (except on the first post from Evan Williams), no comments, no TrackBack. At least it has permalinks. (Dare Obasanjo covered some more of the GoogleBlog’s non-blogginess on Tuesday).

Contrast this with Kinja’s blog, which hasn’t had nearly as much fanfare. Bylines, personal voices, commenting on things their customers have written about their service (including, yes, something by me. Bias disclosed!). Which is more bloglike? Which is more interesting?

Believe me, as a Microsoft blogger (even if I’m not hosted at blogs.msdn.com), I have a lot of sympathy for the Google blog folks. It’s hard to walk that line of being an “official” corporate blog, and the temptation to edit to preserve the company’s voice and image must be really high. Which is why I wonder: why did they launch an official blog at all? Weren’t they better off just having Evan blog occasionally about his day job?

Ha! The magic power of the Kinja is about to reveal itself

I’ve been using Kinja on and off for the last few weeks, ever since I made a Kinja digest for both Hooblogs (see here) and Sloanblogs (see here). The digests were an afterthought, inspired by the press that Kinja was getting, but now (to my surprise) they’re the most useful features of both lists.

What’s cool about Kinja is that it’s lightweight, loads quickly, provides an attractive UI, is intelligent about providing excerpts of the item descriptions, and provides a “read anywhere” view of your set of sites. Radio, which was the first aggregator I ever used, provided an attractive UI but wasn’t especially lightweight (particularly in its Mac OS 9 incarnation) and provided full descriptions of the items in each feed. It’s funny how much I like the abridged description feature, in fact, since my own feed provides full text descriptions and since I normally hate having to click through to get the full story. But Kinja’s apparently simple algorithm of grabbing the first two or three sentences of the description if it’s above a pre-set length is remarkably effective. It’s also made me more conscious about not burying the lead of my posts; in short, it’s improved my writing.

Estonia, moving forward with WiFi

Catching up on an item I pointed to almost two years ago: a new BBC article today discusses the progress made toward unwiring Tallinn, the Estonian capital. Currently over 250 free public WiFi hotspots have been deployed throughout the country. Interesting note at the bottom: “Many Estonians, especially the younger ones, are embracing wireless internet access wholeheartedly. That is especially true now that the economy is starting to improve, and more can afford laptops.”

From the “oh God, my eyes” department

A friend just shared this little jewel of a wedding dress auction, and I had to pass it along. I have to say, the man has guts. I don’t think I’d have quite the shape to pull that off. At least the updates to the page show he’s having fun—and maybe he’ll get a decent proposal out of it…

(Incidentally, a $600 bid for a used wedding dress? I think that may be a prime example of what economists call the “winner’s curse” in effect.)

How Google works

A few times in the last month, I’ve had conversations with people that went something like, “Oh, I wonder how Google’s editorial staff keeps up to construct relevant search results for all those terms.” Apologies to the speakers, but that’s a little like wondering how those elves make the cookies taste so good.


My former coworker Craig Pfeifer points to the original journal papers that underlie the theory of how Google ranks content on the web, including PageRank, some data mining algorithms, and Google itself. If looking at these papers tells the reader anything about Google, it’s that the relevance isn’t built editorially. The rules of the underlying algorithms might be tweaked a little bit from time to time, but the heavy editorializing of results isn’t really necessary.


Interesting point: a lot of the exploits that have been done on Google in the last few years, such as propping up a page by using lots of pointers from the home page of low-ranked sites and Google-bombing through the use of link text, are either implicitly or explicitly called out in these papers. In the case of the former, Brin and Page admit that it might be possible to outsmart the relevance algorithms with a lot of low-ranked sites, and say “At worst, you can have manipulation in the form of buying advertisements (links) on important sites. But, this seems well under control since it costs money.” Apparently they didn’t predict link farms or blog memes too well, but that isn’t to say that their work is a miserable failure…