Still going after all these years.
Doc Searls points to some common misspellings of his name through Google. So I tried it out, and was thrilled to note that, like for Doc, Google tries to help out. The most common misspelling of my name, omitting one of the two ending ts, turns up a “Did you mean “tim jarrett“”? So does searching on tim jarett.
Dig it. Now if everyone were hardwired to Google, I would never have to spell my name over and over again.
Another addition to the Hating Your Customer files: BMW is going after a Mini enthusiasts site for using MINI in the domain name and demanding that the owner surrender the domain name to them (thanks to Doc for the pointer).
I’m sympathetic to the club—after all, there have been BMW people on the forums for over a year, as the slogan below points out. And these are the guys that have been keeping the flame alive for the MINI all these years. On the other hand, the potential for trademark dilution is pretty clear, and MCO does sell merchandise and accept advertising.
DaveNet: Rolling Stone supports RSS 2.0. Well, it’s about time. There’s a long moribund Rolling Stone album reviews feed in my aggregator that worked about a year ago. The new feeds are RSS 2.0, and include movie, music, and DVD reviews as well as music news and a separate photo feed.
Via Scripting News, Deane asks whether RSS aggregators should strip style attributes (presumably, this would also apply to aggregators of Atom/Echo/whatever the RSS successor format is called as well).
Count me in the minority that wants my feeds presented as the author provided, within limits (“I wants my funk uncut”). There is semantic meaning carried in tags like <strong>, <em>, and <pre> that would render some posts meaningless. That said, I hate feeds that render as white text but don’t have the dark background specified in their page’s body tag to make the post readable. Maybe if everyone moved to using CSS stylesheets and classes instead of local CSS styles or <font> tags, preserving styles would be OK.
In fact, let’s go a step further: CSS compliant styles should be rendered by aggregators; old-skool HTML styles should be stripped. How’s that for incentive to learn the new technology?
Now if this were a true type smackdown they’d let us choose contestants for Round 2. (Futura? Myriad?) But there’s
something strangely satisfying about Helvetica sending Arial to the mat letter by letter.
Dave points out that LiveJournal blogs have started pinging Weblogs.com. This means that Weblogs.com gets a new high water mark almost for free. My data has been updated, and the chart is below:
I was definitely right to hesitate about predicting exponential growth of the blogosphere back in May. Look at what has happened to the shape of the curve since then. I think what happened was that the end of the war made a lot of people update less frequently, and may have driven some warbloggers off the map entirely. But I also noticed that the traffic on Weblogs.com systematically flirted with the high water mark throughout May and June.
I think the time has come to start investigating the data more systematically. Time to look at starting that cron job…
A few quick updates:
Dave drops a bombshell in the syndication controversy: UserLand has transferred the RSS spec copyright to the Berkman Center; has put it under a Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license; and set up an advisory board to promote RSS and maintain the spec according to the roadmap.
Politically this is mostly savvy. I’m curious to see where the “advisory board” bit goes. But congrats to Brent for his role on the board. It’s always really good to have a pragmatic developer who has to consume the spec on board.
On Ed Felten’s blog, a new bill introduced in the House of Representatives that once again overreaches itself in a serious way trying to protect the content middlemen: the Author, Consumer, and Computer Owner Protection and Security (ACCOPS) Act of 2003. The bill states that to knowingly offer “enabling software,” defined as software that, “when installed on the users’ computer, enables third parties to store data on that computer, or use that computer to search other computers’ content over the Internet,” and not to warn of the privacy implications and offer the user a chance to opt out, may result in a fine or jail time.
I perhaps overreach in ascribing an RIAA or MPAA agenda to this bill. It could easily be interpreted as a consumer protection act against “spyware” and viruses (not that we really need consumer protection against virus software; existing laws have proved pretty capable of handling them). However, Felten correctly points out that the language is so broad that a download of Microsoft Windows could be covered under the bill, while the original Napster client, “lacking upload and network search facilities,” would not be covered.
It would save us all a lot of time if the folks writing these bills would get the help of someone other than whoever’s pockets they happen to be in before introducing them. Then maybe we could together work out a consensus definition of “bad technology” that’s a little more precise.
Spotted on Boing-Boing, the Hipster Bingo game. I definitely fit one of the squares on the excerpt to the right; I’m not sure if I’m hip enough to be a “grampa” (though I fit the other part of the definition).
And what’s up with that digital camera? That’s so 1999. It’s gotta be a cam phone now. But I gotta say, it would have taken me about 20 minutes to get Bingo at the Pernice Brothers show, and only that long because the number of hoodies and ski-vests on hand in Seattle in the summer is pretty small.
Very brief keiretsu update:
Looks like things are moving over in Userland, where (except for Dave, who is after all only majority shareholder now, having given up the CEO-ship when he took his fellowship) only Lawrence’s blog and the product news page have been active in the past month. Yesterday two significant happenings: John Robb announced that he was no longer working at Userland (shortly thereafter his blog was removed from the company’s servers), and Dave reported that part of his trip back west next week is to address some things about the company (he had previously alluded to “moving some servers”).
For unrelated reasons, I couldn’t sleep last night, and dreamt that someone wrote on their blog about the whole scenario: “follow the brown acid.” And that Brent had made so much money from NetNewsWire that he was going to buy out UserLand. I’m not sure that’s any weirder than what is really going on.
As everyone has noticed, the national telemarketing “do not call” registry became open yesterday at donotcall.org. This MSNBC article says that the website stayed up, but the problem is mail. Every single phone number registered requires a confirmation email to be sent. Let’s see, 370,000 customers by noon, so figure about a million customers, each generating between one and three pieces of mail. Yeah, that would look like spam if I were operating a mail server.
So I’m not surprised that, although I registered our phones yesterday, I still don’t have my confirmation emails. I just I hope I get them within the 72-hour window.
More reaction to the dialog about Echo yesterday:
Phil (over at Blogcount) has come up with a preliminary estimate of the size of the blogosphere using published counts and estimates of Blogger, LiveJournal, and DiaryLand usage. With a fudge factor, he estimates the size at between 2.4 and 2.9 million.
In this game everything is guesses and approximations, since (a) not everyone is on a centralized site, and (b) not everyone uses centralized tools like Weblogs.com. But I think the next logical step is to benchmark this number using a different technique, like the number of sites registered in Technorati, Blogdex, or even Blogshares, or a longitudinal study of Weblogs.com that looks for repeat pings and calculates a unique number of pingers.