I was invited to a music-sharing group recently – here’s the tracklist of the CD I brought
Kinja as Free Public Weblog Aggregator
As with many other curious webloggers today, I tried out Kinja, a new web-based RSS aggregator tool. It is intentionally simple, not offering the power of most other aggregators in favour of being more palatable to new users.
After trying it out, I was a bit surprised to see that my list of sites was automatically shared to the public. I don’t mind sharing my site list, and I even do like the idea of having lists be shared by default, but I would have appreciated some warning.
Then, while reading some of the rationale behind Kinja, the mention of how it was modeled after the format of a weblog, in reverse-chronological order, led me to think that Kinja could work well as a free weblog aggregator for public consumption, rather than just personal use.
More and more aggregated weblogs have been cropping up lately, especially in the open-source development world. For example, there is an aggregated Gnome weblog, an aggregated Fedora weblog, and many more. There is even an open-source project to develop the code behind these aggregators. Well, Kinja may be a quick and simple way to produce an aggregated weblog.
Setting up an account does require an unique email address (I have email addresses up the wazoo, so this wasn’t a problem). As an example, I created an aggregated weblog for the Weblogs of 84 Fitzroy St. — the building in which I work along with several other webloggers.
While I don’t expect this is really the intended use of Kinja, it can only be good for them, since their revenue is generated by advertising. The only thing that is really missing is having an RSS feed of the aggregated weblog — something I can imaging Kinja doesn’t have because it is already an RSS aggregator. Maybe they’ll add feeds for this purpose.
Update: Perhaps this is obvious, but something I forgot to mention in my original post: many weblog platforms allow you to have RSS feeds per category. So, if there were a group of weblogs that all talked about their cats, and about technology XYZ, you could aggregate the RSS feeds from their “technology XYZ” categories and people interested could get the groups view, without seeing pictures of their cats.
Using the future to sell the present
During a recent conversation about software upgrades (to which I am a confessed addict), a friend made the profound statement that “everyone loves the future.”
Perhaps you’ve seen the recent television advertisements in which GM promotes their oddly-spelled “hy-wire” concept car. As Wired News reported in September of 2002, the concept car promises a future based on hydrogen fuel cells.
It is nothing new for auto companies to use concept cars to generate press and attention. However, I find this most recent advertising campaign a bit offensive. GM is using the promise of an eventual product to sell completely unrelated products today. Does the Hy-Wire work yet? Is the one we see in the TV commercial actually powered by fuel cells?
The premise seems to me to be something like “someday we’ll make a great car that’s environmentally friendly — in the mean-time, be sure to pick up a new Cavalier or Escalade”.
Community-produced audio recording of Laurence Lessig’s New Book
Having enjoyed Laurence Lessig’s previous book, The Future of Ideas, I was looking forward to his latest book, Free Culture. The text of the book is available for free online. While I have read long works from my laptop LCD, this 352-page PDF file didn’t seem very appealing on screen.
I thought it would be nice to have an audio-book format. I even considered recording it myself – which would be acceptable considering the Creative Commons license on the book. However, I didn’t have the time, energy, or more importantly, the talent to do a good job at recording this.
With this in the back of my mind, I came across a post by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing about a weblogger-produced collaborative audio-book recording of the new Lessig book.
Now, only a few minutes after wondering if I should produce this myself, I’m listening to Chapter 1. Cool.
Nice list of good “favicons” – I’ve added a few other suggestions in reply
Profanity in the source code: the Linux kernel and Mozilla – Anyone do a count on the leaked Windows code?
Three great explodingdog.com illustrations: 1, 2, 3
The Nanode – a really small computer – very slick
The bar/restaurant around the corner, Babbas Lounge, is offering free wifi
Weblogs and the future of Linux desktop development
The future of development on the Linux desktop is being debated and deliberated on the weblogs of key developers this week.
If you are interested in computing platform decisions and open source software, then you may be interested in the debate. However, even if you are not at all interested in these things, it may be interesting in a more abstract sense.
On a campus in Redmond, Washington, smart and talented people are deciding what your computer is going to be like in the next decade. Here, in a parallel universe of sorts, smart and talented people are debating an alternative future for desktop computing — and you can read every word it.
Havoc Pennington, a Gnome hacker from RedHat, Miguel de Icaza, a founder of the Gnome project and Ximian, Robert Love, a kernel hacker with Ximian, and many others are batting around the posible platform options for linux desktop development. It’s strangely empowering to witness.
The debate and dialog continues and can be followed on Planet Gnome, an aggregated weblog of Gnome developer weblogs.
Mailing lists have generally been the primary communication method of open source developers. While mailing lists are still the core of the communication, weblogs have started to play an interesting role. They are especially effective for high-profile debate and dialog like this. Unlike a public mailing list, the signal-to-noise ratio is high.