Category Archives: Software

NewsFire 1.0

David Watanabe just released version 1.0 of NewsFire, a minimalist and speedy feed aggregator for Mac OS X. NewsFire is shareware and may be purchased for $20. I still use NetNewsWire but NewsFire has impressed me for many months with its speed and ease of use. Please open the application to AppleScript so I can write some hacks!…

Ask Jeeves buying Bloglines?

Mary Hodder reports Ask Jeeves is buying Bloglines and Mark Fletcher will be a Jeeves employee on Monday. Is this true? Mark Fletcher is presenting a 20-minute case study this Tuesday on RSS syndication, ad splicing, and blogging at the Media Center event. Perhaps the announcement is meant to coincide with the conference and Mark will use this time to talk about the new Bloglines. Update: Bloglines acquisition is official. Supposedly announced on Friday with an embargo of midnight tonight….

Tag-aware RSS feeds

Brian Del Vecchio wrote a long entry about about splicing a RSS feed by tag and how aggregator developers can create more tag-aware applications. It is possible within the RSS specification, but most feed authors have overlooked how to properly declare tags within their feeds. Flickr does not include categories with its RSS 2.0 feeds and Del.icio.us feeds use Dublin Core subject to provide space-separated tags. Before the feed aggregators can make your life easier we need to all do a better job as content producers to provide valuable information for our users. RSS 2.0 Each RSS 2.0 feed has…

Digital identity event at Future Salon

Last night I attended a Future Salon presentation about digital and online identities. The event was hosted at SAP in Palo Alto. Eric Sachs of Google spoke about Google’s relatively new entry into the digital identity realm with services such as Orkut and Gmail. Jeff Hodges of Liberty Alliance talked about identity systems in the enterprise marketplace. Fen Labalme of Identity Commons talked about identity systems built at the grassroots level for non-governmental organizations. I recorded all three speeches as well as the question and answer period using a directional microphone from my seat in the front row. Eric Sachs…

Six Apart HQ visit

Yesterday I dropped by the Six Apart headquarters unannounced. Everyone was very busily working for 4 p.m. on a Friday. I took some pictures of their new office space. The office layout is open and airy allowing for easy collaboration between teams. There are plenty of conference rooms if you would like some privacy. Two conference rooms are identified as Movable Type and TypePad battlegrounds as the War Room and the Make Love Not War room respectively. The central core of the office space contains lounge areas, executive offices, and a kitchen. Their kitchen had four or five refrigerators,…

Feed aggregators and robot exlcusion

The world of feed aggregators has been compared to the HTML Internet of 1994 by Scott Rosenberg and others.. We are starting to consume and make sense of this new data, but there are currently no well-defined methods or implementations of selective consumption. If I publish content it is instantly available to feed aggregators and search companies with no restraints on its usage regardless of licensing and robot preferences. If a Major League Baseball launched a weblog for the private, non-commercial use of their audience there is nothing stopping companies from adding or supplementing the content without the consent of…

Atom working draft

A new version of the Atom sydication format working draft is online. There are element changes such as a change in the publish date and updated tags, and new category support. The new draft also adds a length attribute to link elements, enabling podcasting and other applications. Format freeze is supposed to happen Monday, January 17….

Technorati cosmos within NetNewsWire

I wrote an AppleScript for NetNewsWire that allows a user to subscribe to the Technorati cosmos for any individual item within NetNewsWire. Users now have a quick and easy way of staying informed about the latest information related to items of interest from the convenience of NetNewsWire. You do not even have to be online to subscribe to the cosmos! This code is the second AppleScript I have ever written — the first was to export my feeds as OPML and FTP the to my server. I almost did not submit it to the Technorati developers’ contest but I won…

Attention.xml export for NetNewsWire

Attention.xml is an open standard to track attention metadata such as what you read and what you would like to learn more about. So far there has been a lot of talk around the idea and what it could mean for synchronization, resource discovery, and social networking. Technorati and Steve Gillmor have talked about the idea but there has been no implementation to show how you could use this open format with existing applications such as web browsers and feed aggregators to make sense out of your daily activity. Until now. I wrote an AppleScript that exports all of your…