justinmaccarthy

RSS and ping (and trackback) are what made the blog explosion happen. Content was routed, manipulated, aggregated, tagged and tracked.

What enabled this were the blogging tools and software, that allowed users to simply create content and RSS-ify it.

So what would the tools for a business need to do? Well you tell me!! comments please!
Here are a few ideas to get going..

• News + content (manuals etc)

I think RSS takes care of most of this.

• Describe the business

e.g. We are a furniture shop, retail.

• Describe your business outlet locations, opening times and contact info

… add services available at each outlet? E.g . wifi available, handicap accessibility.

• Describe products in a standard way

This would simplify comparison for prices etc. across vendors. Both Yahoo! and Google (Froogle) have their own standards for this.

• A way to describe discounts and special offers

Sale on 14th – 15th December, 20% off everything.

Once these pieces exist, you should be able to ask questions like,

Show me furniture shops near me holding a sale in the next week.

or

Show me furniture shops with items described as couches, with prices less than 600 Euros , that are open after 6pm

…. and we all know that would be good.

If you sell online, read what Seth Godin says about the
shopping cart conversion. I suspect he is right.

Check out the extremely odd Rocketboom vlog coverage of Katrina. I’m not sure what to think about it at all? What do you think?

Jon Udell has a piece about the problem of link rot for RSS readers, The saga of RSS (dis)continuity , which I was about comment on when I read Dare Obasanjo’s post, which basically says nearly everything I was going to say in the first place.

Its hard to be cool

I’ll will comment on one thing mentioned by Jon and Dave,

Jon Udell said:

If you control your server, you can of course do an HTTP-level redirect. But your blog is hosted, you probably can’t, in which case you need to use the feed itself to signal the redirect.

to which Dave Obasanjo replies:

This part just boggles my mind. If the user’s blog is hosted (e.g. they are a LiveJournal, MSN Spaces or BlogSpot user) then not only can’t they control the HTTP headers emitted by the server but they don’t control their web feed either. So what exactly is the alternate solution that works in that case? If anything, this points to the fact that blog hosting services should give users the ability to redirect their RSS feed when they leave the service. This is a feature request for the various blog hosting services not an indication that a new technical solution is needed.

Actually a technical solution is needed, but its nothing to do with RSS. Its a URI problem, if you lose control of your domain, (or never had it), you are stuck, there isn’t much you can do without the kindness (or $$) of the masters of the domain. In 1998, Tim Berners-Lee wrote an essay called Cool URIs don’t change, but it’s hard to be cool, and Bill de hOra’s piece on the subject will tell you why, so I’ll just point you there.

I know some people hate him, but I like Robert X. Cringely. I liked his Revenge of the Nerds series. I like listening to him on his pulpit. I even liked his Plane Crazy documentary. So that said, I am looking forward to his new IpTV series, Nerd TV which starts next week. Hopefully the content will be great, it sure looks like he has got the delivery exactly right…

For those who think of television as radio with pictures and would rather listen to their NerdTV, the complete shows will be available in three audio formats: AAC (m4a file format, just like iTunes), mp3, and ogg vorbis. The audio files are, of course, substantially smaller than the full video versions, too.

For those who don’t want to spend an hour, we’re pulling two short clips from each show — “the juicy bit” and “the nerdy bit,” which ought to appeal to the technical and/or prurient interests in most of us. Give them a try, it’s easy.

The kind of content I like, anyway I want it. Perfect. I hope this kind of broadcasting leads the way.

Looks like I was right about the lack of OPML import/export in iTunes.
Dave says it best, a Roach Motel. WHEN you are fixing it Apple, how about adding support for username/password protected RSS feeds? Its a low hanging fruit, pick it.

iTunes 4.9 has been released with the much talked about Podcasting additions. But as I look at it I can’t find someway of importing (or exporting…) my OPML file. Have I just missed it somewhere or is this a bad oversight ?

The Irish Linux User group have launched a wiki to help promote Free Software in Schools.

Read all about scoil.linux.ie here.

On the Irish blogger mailing list I asked for stats on which blogging software was being used within the Irish Bloggosphere. Well John has delivered

Some surprises/quirks in there. Interesting and helpful.

One question, is that an automatted process now ? Easy to update once a month or so?
Also one extra data point that would be helpful would be version. Be interesting to see how many folk are paying for Moveable Type or are still using the old free version.

Great work John, thanks.

Don’t you just hate spam blogs ?

My technorati search on “google”

Obviously no PageRank algorithm in operation here. I wonder why that is?

tag:google gets me better results, but how long before spammers figure that one out (answer: 0 seconds)