Near the Botanical Garden. Flickr version here.
RSS dead? Perish the thought
As usual, some of the most thoughtful commenting on the Web revolves around Dave Winer. Here’s an insightful comment on his posts about the “RSS is dead” meme.
What I love about RSS, is it’s an open source technology so to speak. No Cisco, Microsoft, IBM or any company for that matter has an interest. It’s a broadcasting system. I don’t see how it could possibly ‘die,’ go away, or be replaced. I actually see it getting stronger and stronger as the depths of the Internet get deeper and deeper. Publishers love the ability of their content to be disseminated in far off lands because ultimately they get the linkback, gain new followers, gain ad impressions, the list goes on…
In a way, it’s like saying the current pipe network stemming from the water company delivering me water to my house will go away. Possible, but doubtful. Even so, if we all have an ‘eco-friendly’ water tower built on the roofs of our house, and an underground water collection network in our backyard that collects excess rain water, purifies it, and eventually delivers it to our sinks and showers, the water (content) is still being delivered through a pipe (rss) to my water tank (aggregator, end-user). The pipe is necessary to get from point A to point B, even if we are in space and the shortest distance between two points is a curved line. There is still a pipe involved, whether it is physical or abstract.
We seem to always go down these types of roads every time a new technology is introduced (i.e. Twitter) that gains a large following. Everyone thinks it’s the end of civilization. Twitter is RSS. It’s a pipe. Diversification would say you are safest when you don’t put all your eggs in one basket (in one pipe), so are we really that stupid to rely on one delivery system (Twitter) to deliver us the goods?
End of the peer show
ITV, a TV company in terminal decline, is dropping its only remaining approximation to a high-brow show. Germaine Greer has a nice piece about it in the Guardian, in which she says:
The South Bank Show archive will be essential viewing for anyone aiming to give an account of the cultural cross-currents of the late 20th century — essential if hardly sufficient. Its successors are the current generation of arts magazine shows, grabs at important subjects, presented by celebrities, shot upsoide down and backwards, with competing soundtracks, arts journalism as art itself, processed for a public with a three-minute attention span.
The miracle, I suppose, is not that the SBS has finally been axed, but that it survived for so long in the cultural desert of contemporary British commercial television.
Advertorial
Interesting, er, coincidence. Today’s Sun has (of course) a two-page spread about Marks and Spencer’s decision to charge more for bigger brassieres. Now that’s the kind of news that good ol’-fashioned print newspapers labour mightily to bring to public attention — the kind of stuff that those lazy old bloggers in their pyjamas will never have the energy and dedication to report.
Turn the page and what do we find? Why a full-page ad for M&S.
Another Wikipedia hoax
Another case of an old story. Bet it gets used by steam media as an example of wikipedia failings and nobody wonders what ‘reputable’ newspapers were doing reprinting it without checking.
A WIKIPEDIA hoax by a 22-year-old Dublin student resulted in a fake quote being published in newspaper obituaries around the world.
The quote was attributed to French composer Maurice Jarre who died at the end of March.
It was posted on the online encyclopedia shortly after his death and later appeared in obituaries published in the Guardian, the London Independent, on the BBC Music Magazine website and in Indian and Australian newspapers.
“One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack. Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head, that only I can hear,” Jarre was quoted as saying.
However, these words were not uttered by the Oscar-winning composer but written by Shane Fitzgerald, a final-year undergraduate student studying sociology and economics at University College Dublin.
Mr Fitzgerald said he placed the quote on the website as an experiment when doing research on globalisation.
Fake identities to be available without prescription
Now, let’s get this right. the purpose of the government’s ID card scheme is to make identity theft more difficult. So here’s how it will work, according to this Guardian report.
High street chemists, post offices and photo shops are to be used to record the electronic fingerprints and other biometric data needed for the national identity card scheme, the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, is to announce today.
The decision to use high street shops sidesteps the need for the Home Office to set up a network of enrolment centres with mobile units to operate in rural areas.
The move comes as the latest Home Office report to parliament on the costs of the scheme show they have risen by a further £221m to a total of £5.3bn over the next 10 years. That figure excludes the costs to other government departments and agencies of scanners and other equipment for verifying the identity of those trying to access public services…
So, who will vet Boots employees? Luckily, this nonsense is unlikely to survive New Labour’s forthcoming election defeat.
RSS RIP?
Steve Gillmor thinks it’s dead.
It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of news, which means it’s not worth swimming in if you get my drift.
I haven’t been in Google Reader for months. Google Reader is the dominant RSS reader. I’ve done the math: Twitter 365 Google Reader 0. All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.
Wolfram Alpha vs Google
At last, some data. David Talbot got a login id from Wolfram and ran some comparative tests. For example:
SEARCH TERM: 10 pounds kilograms
WOLFRAM ALPHA: The site informed me that it interpreted my search term as an effort to multiply "10 pounds" by "1 kilogram" and gave me this result: 4.536 kg2 (kilograms squared) or 22.05 lb2 (pounds squared).
GOOGLE: Google gave me links to various metric conversion sites.
Tentative conclusion: the semantic web is still a long way off. The problem of search is only about 5% solved. Google accounts for 3% of that. Mr Talbot’s experiments suggest that Wolfram isn’t going to move it much beyond 6%. Still, it’s progress. And Google could do with some competition,
Bluebells
High point of this Bank Holiday was a walk in a wood carpeted with bluebells.
Flickr versions here and here.
LATER: Nice message from Harry M:
Glad to see that yours are the native British variety. Round my neck of the woods we have been invaded by the Spanish variety which hybridises with the native and produces inferior offspring. See Bluebells in Wikipedia. From which an extract below.
“In Britain and probably elsewhere there has been extensive hybridisation with the introduced Hyacinthoides hispanica producing fertile seeds. This has produced hybrid swarms around sites of introductions and, since the the hybrids are able to thrive in a wider range of environmental conditions, the hybrids are frequently out-competing the native Bluebells. Hybrids show a great range of characteristics and any one of the following features indicates some hybridisation. Stems upright and not nodding; flowers borne on more than one side of the flowing stem; the flower is more open and bell shaped and does not have a long and more or less parallel sided tube; the anthers, at least when young are blue or cyan and not white or cream; the leaves are broader; the scent is less strong and less sweet.”
Wolfram Alpha hype machine gathers speed
Well, well. “An invention that could change the internet for ever” is how the guy in the Indie describes it.
The biggest internet revolution for a generation will be unveiled this month with the launch of software that will understand questions and give specific, tailored answers in a way that the web has never managed before.
All based on second-hand ‘shock and awe’ quotes, I note. It’s conceivable, of course, that there’s something in it. For one thing, Jonathan Zittrain (who is no fool) seems to take it seriously — see his respectful introduction to Dr Wolfram’s lecture at Harvard Law.