Bloglines is now available in Spanish, Japanese, traditional Chinese, French, German, and Portuguese. Mark should open up the interface and allow users to add their own launguages like Google’s interface.
Bloglines adds international flavors
Recent Comments RSS Feed Template for Movable Type
A few months ago Jeremy Zawodny posted his Movable Type template for a RSS feed of all comments regardless of their approval status. I liked the idea as a way to keep e-mail clutter to a minimum. I took the idea and created my own recent comments RSS feed template using no namespaces or CDATA. The feed validates.
I created a new index template and set the RSS file to regenerate with every index build. Every time you post your comments feed is rebuilt. For some people that will be not often enough but for me it works well.
MSN Spaces and MSN Messenger
MSN turned on MSN Spaces last night and of course I had to set up my own test weblog and tinker a bit with every feature I could find.
MSN Spaces does not declare a doctype and their HTML does not validate. The RSS feeds do validate without Microsoft resorting to CDATA inside the description element.
The use of MSN Messenger as a weblog interface is the news I actually care about. I installed MSN Messenger 7 beta to take a look at the MSN Spaces integration.
Messenger now places a small star on the bottom right of each contact icon, as pictured above. Clicking on the icon reveals a contact card with My Space information on the first card.
You see the last post title and brief summary as well as some of my photographs. The contact card uses the same theme as my MSN Spaces pages. “See more” takes you to that person’s My Space page. Since this contact is me, I also see space to add entry or visit my MSN Spaces configuration page.
Very cool but too bad it is limited to MSN only for now. Hopefully there will be ways of adding non-MSN RSS content to the contact card as well.
Jason Kottke and Sony
Jason Kottke’s recent experience with Sony has him reconsidering his role as a publisher. Is the hassle worth it?
Only big publishers have the budgets to deal with any hint of legal issues. I raised this issue at Lawrence Lessig’s Law & Blogging session at BloggerCon. Regardless of fair use, being on the right side of the law, it is difficult to gather the resources to respond to legal harassment. Lessig differentiated between a “nastygram” and an actual legal filing.
Jason has demonstrated good judgment and community building in the past. I received an e-mail from Jason before he pointed at one of my entries with a file hosted on my servers to let me know he would be willing to mirror the file if I had bandwidth issues. He has worked on projects such as Dropcash to help the weblog community raise funds.
Hopefully someone with a legal background will step in and help Jason tell Sony to go away and play with the MPAA some more instead.
Howard Rheingold class at Stanford
Howard Rheingold is teaching a class titled Toward a Literacy of Cooperation at Stanford on Wednesdays from 4:15 p.m. to 5:45 p.m. from January 5, 2005 until March 16. The class covers the economics of cooperation and will utilize weblogs and wikis to communicate between classes and with people from all over the world. Syllabus readings include Smart Mobs, Eric Bonabeau, Joi Ito, and Micah Sifry are all required readings.
Non-students who live in the area can show up to the course without signing up.
If you live outside the area we hope to be able to deliver a videostream to you.
Sweet! I wish I could attend, but probably cannot leave work to be in Palo Alto by 4:15 p.m. I will try to follow along through videos.
Gator EULA prohibits uninstallers
Ben Edelman read through the 63-page EULA for Gator and found some pretty interesting clauses.
You agree that you will not use, or encourage others to use, any unauthorized means for the removal of the GAIN AdServer, or any GAIN-Supported Software from a computer.
Ad-Aware and Spybot are of course not on the approved list.
Gator displays advertisements on a computers with its software installed. These advertisements are triggered by the sites you browse, often showing a competitive offering for e-commerce sites. Like spam, the way to make companies like Claria (makers of Gator) go away is to simply not click the advertisements. Better yet, write the companies doing business with Claria and let them know their decision to partner with such companies has lost your business.
NexTag, my current employer, pays Claria and WhenU to serve advertisements on the sites of competitors. If you would like to voice your opinion on advertisers contributing to spyware, e-mail advertising@nextag.com or call (650) 645-4700 to let them know what you think.
Python 2.4 is out
Python 2.4 is now available. Unification of integers and long integers, better floating point number support, multiple calls per XML-RPC operation, cookie support, and a subprocess module for spawning platform-independent processes are just some of the new features.
David Sifry Red Herring interview
Red Herring published an interview with David Sifry of Technorati. The questions are pretty hard hitting and you get more background on Dave than the typical Technorati mention, like what he remembers about his high school prom. Secret to success? Work your ass off.
Q. As much as Technorati is popular today, the company’s position in the industry can be considered tenuous. Do you have an exit strategy?
A. Watch this space.
Q. Are you profitable?
A. Not yet.
Creative Commons question
My weblog is currently licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. I allow comments for every post, subject to my approval. Other persons are therefore able to add their own content to an individual entry page.
The work is the individual entry on my weblog. By adding a comment a person is essentially creating a derivative of the work, an annotation to an entry.
Are comments considered part of the work and therefore subject to the Creative Commons license? If so, I should probably remind posters that their submission is subject to the license. Any thoughts?
Sidenote: Movable Type does not make it easy enough for me to manage Creative Commons licenses. I cannot change my Creative Commons license through my weblog configuration screen, even if I am granting a more liberal license than before. I should also be able to turn on or off a license for a post just as I am able to do with comments or TrackBacks.
Technorati two years later
Two years ago Dave Sifry announced Technorati: a new site with a set of web services he always wanted and spent three weekends hacking. Take a look at the Technorati of two years ago.
Unofficial history of Technorati
- November 20, 2002
- Official first use date.
- November 27, 2002
- Technorati officially unveiled. 12,000 weblogs indexed.
- December 4, 2002
- RSS watchlists.
- December 15, 2002
- First Technorati dinner.
- December 18, 2002
- Technorati sidebar.
- February 7, 2003
- Site contents released under Creative Commons license.
- February 26, 2003
- First major downtime: 4 hours.
- March 5, 2003
- 100,000 weblogs indexed.
- March 9, 2003
- Revenues of $2,000 over three months from charging a yearly subscription of $5 for an e-mail watchlist and $10 for a RSS watchlist.
- March 21, 2003
- Current events launches.
- April 6, 2003
- 200,000 weblogs indexed.
- May 8, 2003
- Google hints at blog-specific search tool.
- May 12, 2003
- Technorati API released for cosmos, bloginfo, and outbound blogs.
- June 9, 2003
- Technorati keyword search launches.
- June 21, 2003
- 300,000 weblogs indexed.
- July 05, 2003
- Technorati pinger launched.
- September 27, 2003
- 1 million weblogs indexed.
- February 4, 2004
- First hiring post.
- March 22, 2004
- Three free watchlists. BookTalk launches.
- March 30, 2004
- 2 million weblogs indexed.
- May 19, 2004
- First Technorati Developers Salon.
- June 24, 2004
- Keyword advertising launches, powered by FindWhat.
- July 7, 2004
- 3 million weblogs tracked.
- July 21, 2004
- CNN announces partnership with Technorati for the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
- July 26, 2004
- Politics subdomain launched.
- August 23, 2004
- $6.5 million venture capital funding at a valuation of about $12 million.
- August 27, 2004
- CNN announced partnership with Technorati for the Republican National Convention in New York.
- August 31, 2004
- Technorati pinger integrated into Movable Type.
- September 26, 2004
- Colocation center electrical fire followed by a weekend of down time.
- October 6, 2004
- First Technorati Hackathon.
- October 10, 2004
- 4 million weblogs indexed.
- October 21, 2004
- Technorati open house at their new offices @ 665 Third Street in San Francisco.
- November 5, 2004
- Advanced search capabilities, top 20 MP3s. Developer program launched.
- November 11, 2004
- Technorati search and post cosmos featured in Blogware default templates.