Ruminate

Wired News reports that, unless something changes, RSS will kill the web because of the increased traffic of aggregation.

The first problem here is dealing with a future problem as if we have only today’s solutions. In essence, this article is making a complaint akin to claiming, a few years ago, that 3-D games would kill the gaming PC because processors and disk drives weren’t fast enough. Now ten year olds have 2.x ghz PCs with a gig of ram.

Besides changes in bandwidth (it isn’t really a bandwidth problem, it’s a bandwidth allotment problem), perhaps this will spur more services that do things right, like Bloglines (and others, I am sure). There is no reason that other software can’t check for updates properly and that more centralized cacheing systems won’t spring up. Frankly, it’s better for the consumer to have feeds aggregated and cached at a central point than to make hundreds of connections checking for content from one’s own PC anyway. A central aggregator is inherently a kind of backup and most likely running on a more reliable platform with more reliable net access.

If all us boys and girls are really good, maybe Techno Claus will bring us integration of RSS aggregation into mail and news servers, so that checks for new content will be no more troublesome than my email program mercilessly checking for new mail every (gasp!) ten minutes!

Update: Dave Winer posts an interesting idea of a BitTorrent like approach to handling RSS overload. I bet many more good ideas will appear in no time. That’s the power of blogging. These things will actually happen when we need them. I’m not always an advocate of the approach that “the solutions will appear” but neither do I underestimate the power of contingency to spur development.

1. No one in Bethel takes credit cards. Even the cashiers in restaurants that have those little Visa/Mastercard decals on the windows will look at you in disbelief if you present a card.
2. No ATM machines in Bethel will actually dispense cash, nor will they tell you that until you’ve spent ten minutes accessing your account (ten minutes spent waiting for the cashier to get off the phone because it shares the same line as the ATM).
3. Hotels purposefully position televisions and mirrors in such a way that you can watch the television in the mirror while sitting on the toilet.
4. Given the geometry of any room, the phone jacks for your modem will always be located as far away from any table, chair, or electrical outlet as physically possible.
5. If you do manage to reach the phone you’re likely to discover that the telephone system is picking up the overpowering FM religious station radio broadcast.

Whenever I talk about RSS I mention– in passing– its benefits over browsing to individual sites when utilizing a low-bandwidth connection. But like many others, I am completely spoiled by high powered connections at work and at home.

On my second day of using a slow, satellite-hop-in-the-middle-chewing-the-clock, dial-up connection I have started to remember what dial-up is like and have a greater appreciation for those who take the time to provide substantial RSS feeds.

Sites without RSS– or sites with only excerpts in their RSS feeds– are going unread. Again. RSS, Atom, whatever. My time is simply too valuable to waste on sites that could have it but want me to be required to “experience” their site instead of just enjoy their content.

1. I wonder why the Airport Burger King menus have a line of text that indicates “picture menus are available upon request.”
2. Joking about “carry ons” and “carrion” isn’t funny. Hearing it from two different people in the span of two flights is downright disturbing.
3. If you turn on the tap and it spits out what looks like mud followed by water of a color that makes you think “well, they wouldn’t put these cups here next to the sink unless the water were safe to drink, right?” you can be pretty sure you picked the wrong hotel.
4. A dinner of yogurt covered pretzels, no drinking water, hours of creating web curriculum, and falling asleep while watching the Sopranos can lead to bizarre– even horrifying– dreams.

I’m off to (probably not so) sunny Bethel, Alaska (way out West) to do some faculty training at the fab Kuskokwim Campus.

Among other things, I’ll be teaching faculty about weblogs, wikis, and RSS as a means of creating classroom community and a collaborative learning environment.

I’ll be back in the wee hours Sunday morning where a dirty house and a sink full of dirty dishes (and three days worth of work backup at the office) anxiously await my return…

About Me, My Family, and this Site

Colophon

“Dammit Jim, I’m a poet not a programmer!”

This site, such as it is, was created using using TextPattern and PHP. I hack at the site and code inefficiently using tools that are probably powerful in competent hands, primarily:

• TopStyle
• Cygwin/X and Emacs
• Vim

  I also consume prodigous quantities of Diet Coke with Lime and the best coffee anywhere from Alaska Coffee Roasting Company.

  This site is hosted by the developer-friendly TextDrive, and any problems with speed or code are entirely my own doing.

  Help

Presumably you came here through the obscure help function in better browsers such as Mozilla/FireFox/Opera. If you are looking for something specific that you think should be here, or have a question or suggestion that I can help with, send me an email and I’ll see what I can do.

A lot of material from my old site hasn’t been integrated into this site yet, but I plan to get things moved over as soon as possible. Until then, a limited Google search might reveal what you need, such as this search for my Emacs Folding Mode Tutorial

Contact

If you need to contact me using something other than email, you might try IM. My primary IM identity is chris@chrislott.org using MSN Messenger. When I remember to use my multi-client, I am uafchris on Yahoo and AOL, and 40867179 on ICQ.

I can be reached by phone at my office: (907) 474-5122 or by fax: (907) 474-5402 numbers.

I like to send and receive good old fashioned letters as well… in fact, I prefer them to sending email for personal communication. You can send me mail: Chris Lott, PO Box 82826, Fairbanks, AK, 99708-2826, USA.

Jonas writes: ‘There’s one last issue. I was and am reluctant to mention it. [...] As someone who has tattoos and has seen others, I have learned one very valuable lesson – never let someone tattoo you who has no tattoos of his or her own. Aside from Anil Dash’s writings and Mena’s infrequent postings on behalf of Six Apart, very little dogfood seems to be consumed over at the Movable Type camp.’

There is no reason for this reluctance. Jonas’ point exemplifies the personal aspect that makes blogs a valuable source of information. I don’t have a major problem with Movable Type, but it does have its problems. I switched to another tool for a few reasons, some of which aren’t anyone’s fault. I wanted a tool in a language I was better at modifying and was irritated at the time it was taking to release MT3. These are just personal. But the big problem was: I wanted something that would allow comments to be added (and site rebuilds to be done) in a reasonable amount of time.

Movable Type is a resource hog. The payment that is exacted for static pages and scaling well to very high amounts of traffic reading your blog is that it is terrible at dealing with a lot of blog participation. Sites that are regularly updated, whose architecture and look-and-feel evolve, and/or have many people wanting to participate– particularly if the site has any complexity to the layout– are not served well by MT. In this sense, MT isn’t really a CMS, but specfically a weblog publishing tool, and one that expects the simple layouts of link-and-run users.

I chose TextPattern. But it’s still in gamma release and definitely not for everyone. The shoe happens to fit here. WordPress is a great package as well. Blosxom was one of the most intriguing for its simplicity… there is a plethora of sound choices available.

• Blogiomancy

• Draft Chapter on Collaborative Publishing/Weblogging in Education :: by Alex Halavais

1. Grab the nearest book
2. Open the book to page 23
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions

[via Ongoing]

“As if the ground were a rung
suddenly gone from a ladder,
the self, the shoulders bunched
against the road’s each bump, the penis
with it’s stupid grin,
the whole rank slum of cells
collapses.”

From “Driving Alongside the Housatonic River Alone on a Rainy April Night” by William Matthews. Found in Selected Poems & Translations 1969-1991.

(Procrastination drives me to participating in this meme, but I have to note the wonderful choices for word placement in these lines– the break for “the self” and the way the word “penis” juts out past the rest of the poem, while “collapses” folds in on itself on its own line. It’s the little things.)

Micah Sifry writes that Bloggers are Editors Not Journalists, another entry in a long conversation on this subject (more links in the article, but pieces by Jay Rosen and Dave Winer lay the foundation).

This conversation is mired too deeply in conventional roles played by participants in the traditional media mechanism.

Bloggers aren’t editors or journalists, they are both. Which is the point. They are Jeditors. Which has the added geek benefit of implying that the brave blogger is a powerful and daring operative, a word jedi. What could be better than that?

But it’s still hard to tell what many of the LiveJournal diary crowd are actually doing…