Category Archives: Thoughts

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…

I add and delete RSS and Atom feeds from my news aggregators every week. I publish my OPML file on occasion and services such as Dave Winer’s Share Your OPML index the file. Anyone could run a diff of the OPML and modified date and track my subscribes and unsubscribes. What’s lost in the data is why I unsubscribed. I think this unsubscribe data would be valuable to publishers, especially as syndication becomes more corporate. Maybe someone unsubscribes to my feed because they do not like my posts about soccer. I could create a feed that includes or excludes certain…

Amazon has the “So you’d like to…” guides to share product lists spanning a unique category. iTunes Music Store has iMix. What are the data structures for the online publishing world’s self published guide lists? Users of news aggregators in search of new feeds might browse a directory such as Syndic8. While viewing a channel, they see a few guides containing this feed. So you would like to… be a Web standards guru, learn photography, keep up on world news, etc. Guides could be published using OPML. It is Share Your OPML, at a very targeted level. The user would…