Blogonaut

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What happens to the slash?

Scott's blog: Grokker

In Scott's blog: Grokker, Scott makes the following interesting proposal:

Professor Gibson could somehow use Grokker to grade our Weblogs by looking at the size of the radius of the results for looking at our class' blogosphere.

One thing that may be inapparent from the presentation is that it is frequently possible to game this type of system. However, the general concept is interesting.

M Go Blue: Problems with participatory journalism

M Go Blue blogs about Problems with participatory journalism

I was hoping someone would see these issues. Don't just believe it because you read it in a blog. Remarkably, people report what they know to be biased information.

Geek News Central: Terrific article on RSS and content delivery

Geek News Central talks about content delivery systems using RSS. However, he has the link wrong. Here's a better one.

Unclespam's Technology Blog: Mozilla adds RSS support to Firefox and Thunderbird

Unclespam's Technology Blog: Mozilla adds RSS support to Firefox and Thunderbird

This is an extremely interesting review of the RSS features in Firefox and Thunderbird, two Mozilla products. Firefox is the IE substitute we are using in class. Thunderbird is the associated mail program. In their latest releases, both products are adding support for RSS, our favorite XML format. We won't get these products installed on the lab computers because that would just be too disconcerting to the lab folks, but perhaps we can see demos. The way both products use RSS sounds really innovative and neat.

Fascinating study on web page reading

Thinking of a site re-design then read these findings: "Every website owner wants their site to be read from top to bottom, we are no exception. Tonight I read a fascinating article about a survey that was done using volunteers and eye tracking software. [Eyetrack III]"

(Via Geek News Central.)

This is an article that examines how people consume web pages. It has a lot of relevance for how you design your site. A question in my mind is how much it really matters for many authors in this age of syndication. When your content is syndicated, you have no control over how it is displayed.

RSS Attracts Really Serious Money

The following article discusses VC's efforts to fund RSS-based start-ups. The article claims that RSS is having a more rapid adoption rate than most technologies, which sometimes take years to gain acceptance. However, the author fails to note that RSS has been around since 1999. I used it with mynetscape, much as students in BIT320 use it with my.yahoo.com. You could use it with they New York Times. Then, the publishing industry cut RSS off, and it languished for years.

One reason publishers dropped RSS is that they were concerned that it would cut traffic to their sites, limiting their ability to make money from their sites. So, what's different now?

RSS Attracts Really Serious Money

Really Simple Syndication technology, which lets news junkies get instant info feeds from multiple sites, is grabbing investors' attention. The latest evidence: a multimillion-dollar funding round for RSS developer Technorati. By Daniel Terdiman.

[Wired News]