Reading the Google Reader Tea-leaves

If you were online late last night - and especially if you were on Twitter - you may have noted an enormous wave of pain and anger sweeping across the network. Here's what caused it:

On Open Enterprise blog.

RSS Feed for All Comments for Opendotdotdot

After some prodding by a reader (thanks Rob), I've finally switched on the RSS feed for *all* comments, not just on a per-story basis, for anyone who might want such a thing.

You can find it in the top right-hand corner of the main page at http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/.

What Planet Are They On?

First there were RSS feeds, but that soon became too messy. So people have bundled up similar feeds into planets - clever. Here's one of the latest: Planet Creative Commons

This page aggregates blogs from Creative Commons, CC jurisdiction projects, and the CC community.

If nothing else, it will give you a chance to practise your Slovenian.

EU Gets Open Sourcier

The EU is at it again:

An EU-funded consortium will address one of the perceived barriers for the adoption of open source software and prove once and for all that software which is free and publishes its source code, is capable of outperforming anything else on the market. ‘Flossquality.eu’ is an initiative made up of the three EU research projects: QUALOSS, FLOSSMETRICS and SQO-OSS, demonstrating a strong commitment between partners involved in different projects. The intention is that this initiative will facilitate access to information by disseminating news via a joint RSS feed. ‘Flossquality.eu’ will transform the cooperative way of working between these corresponding projects into hard evidence regarding software quality in an open source.

So there we have it - whatever it is. Still, spending all these Euros on something to do with open source must be a good thing. Probably.

World Bank 2.0

Signs of the times:

As explained on BuzzMonitor's "about page" -- "Like many organizations, we started listening to blogs and other forms of social media by subscribing to a blog search engine RSS feed but quickly understood it was not enough. The World Bank is a global institution and we needed to listen in multiple languages, across multiple platforms. We needed something that would aggregate all this content, help us make sense of it and allow us to collaborate around it."

The World Bank contracted with the software firm Development Seed to build the new program, with additional input from the World Resources Institute. Development Seed relied on the popular open-source content management system Drupal for its core code. Last week the bank announced that version 1.0 of BuzzMonitor was available for free download to all comers, and suggested that it was particularly applicable to nonprofit organizations interested in monitoring what the Web was saying about them.

Where in the World is GeoRSS?

A Slashdot post reveals the precise geographical location of my ignorance about GeoRSS:

Geographically Encoded Objects for RSS feeds

This site describes a number of ways to encode location in RSS feeds. As RSS becomes more and more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds.

To avoid the fragmentation of language that has occurred in RSS and other Web information encoding efforts, we have created this site to promote a relatively small number of encodings that meet the needs of a wide range of communities. By building these encodings on a common information model, we hope to promote interoperability and "upwards-compatibility" across encodings.

This is apparently a standard supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium, although, alas, its openness is limited in extent:

Q: Does OGC promote free software and free data?

A: No. OGC promotes the development and use of consensus-derived publicly available and open specifications that enable different geospatial systems (commercial or public domain or open source) to interoperate. For example, OpenGIS Specifications can be used to geospatially enable interoperable Web based applications and portals. These applications or portals can provide either free or available-for-fee services and data that are widely available to Web users.

Warning: Taggers at Work (Again)

Over the New Year period I'll finish off tagging older posts to improve navigation on this site. So please excuse the RSS deluge that follows.

Warning: Taggers at Work

As I've noted before, tagging seems to be something people visiting this site find useful. So I've decided to tag all the older posts on this blog that were written before Blogger got around to adding that facility.

Please, therefore, note that most posts that turn up on RSS feeds over the next few days are not really new: do check the date before you get too excited by what is likely to be very old news.

Really Simple Second Life

If you needed any proof that the distinction between real and virtual is blurring hopelessly, try this: a way of displaying RSS feeds within Second Life.

RSS Feeds: Please Note

It seems that the old feed at

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/atom.xml

is broken (I don't know whether this is a temporary glitch with the beta of the new Blogger or a permanent change). In any case, the following URL seems to work

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/full

Apologies for the inconvenience.

Update: As I rather suspected it might, the original address is now working again, so it was probably some problem at Google. The other address also seems to work, so you can take your choice. The bottom line is, whichever one you've subscribed to, you should be OK.

Wikipeda Does RSS

I amazed this hasn't been done before: you can now track changes to Wikipedia articles through an RSS feed. If you use Firefox, say, to go to the history tab of the page that interests you, you'll find the standard orange radio symbol in the address bar like any other RSS feed.

This is clearly great, because it means that you can watch how pages of interest to you change; it's also clearly terrible, because it means that edit war loonies will be able to engage even more rapidly. (Via Micro Persuasion.)

How to Flaunt Your OPML

When the history of computing in the 1990s comes to be written, the name of Dave Winer will figure quite a few times. For those with long memories, he was a pioneer in the field of outliners like ThinkTank, but he is probably best known for his work on blogs, both in terms of drafting the indispensable RSS standard, and his use of pings to track blog updates.

Now he's at it again, setting up Share Your OPML.

Few will have heard of Outline Processor Markup Language (there's the ThinkTank link), but that may well change with the new site, which uses OPML to collate blog subscription lists from RSS aggregators (or similar) in order to extract higher-level information. In effect, it provides a new cut of the blogosphere, showing things like the top 100 feeds, and who the most prolific subscribers are.

In other words, it'll become another occasion for some healthy geek competition. But it does also serve a potentially more useful role by offering other feeds you might like on the basis of what you already read: think Amazon.com's suggestion service for blogs.

Interestingly, Winer describes this new idea as "A commons for sharing outlines, feeds, and taxonomy." Watch out, it's that meme again....

Daily Me 2.0

One of the problems with blogs for advertisers is their fragmented nature: to get a reach comparable to mainstream media generally involves faffing around with dozens of sites. The obvious solution is to bundle, and that's precisely what Federated Media Publishing does. As its roster of blogs indicates, it operates mainly in the field of tech blogs, but the model can clearly be extended.

To the average blog-reader on the Clapham Ominibus (probably the 319 these days), more interesting than the business side of things is the possibility of doing blog mashups. And lo and behold, Federated has produced such a thing (note that the URL begins significantly with "tech", hinting of non-tech things to come...).

What struck me about this federated news idea is that it could be extended beyond the bundles. It would be easy - well, easy if you're a skilled programmer - to knock up a tool offering a range of newspage formats that let you drag and drop newsfeeds into predefined slots to produce the same kind of effect as the Federated Media/Tech one.

RSS aggregators already do this crudely, but lack the design element that would help to make the approach more popular. You would also need some mechanism for flagging up which stories had changed on the page, or for allowing new stories from designated key blogs to rise to the top of the dynamically-generated newspage.

The result, of course, is the Daily Me that everyone has been wittering on about for years. But it comes with an important twist. This Daily Me 2.0 is not just a cosmetic mixing of traditional medium news, but a very different kind of online newspage, based on the very different perspective offered by blogs.

One reason why Daily Me 1.0 never took off was because traditional media are simply too greedy to contemplate sharing with anyone else. Blogs have no such qualms - indeed, they have different kinds of sharing (quotations, links, comments) at their core. I think we'll be reading more about this....