niallkennedy
I’m hoping part two of the latest Gillmor Gang will prove more interesting.
If you remember the Jason and the Argonauts tale, you might know how Jason succeeded in conquest over the Seed men by casting a stone at one, who thought it was his neighbor, and letting them all kill each other.
That’s what Steve Gillmor seems to do by letting the fellas discuss the importance of Google algorithms and whether site owners can get a cut by having search engines bid for their site search.
If Steve would have put the “knockoff” Cheerios down for a sec I know what he would have said.
It’s not whether Google’s algorithms hold up, it’s whether they can garner more stock in the conversation with all their attention data.
The winners of the future are not the best technologies. We’ll all be able to plug into those the same way we plug into an electrical outlet.
The winners are the services which add value to the conversations happening throughout distributed web networks.
These networks and conversations are fluid and changing constantly in response to our gestures.
Those who don’t get this are either thinking too hard or just not enough.
In a similar way that facial and hand gestures are a meaningful supplement to spoken conversations, the gestures which we talk about with attention are the metadata of the conversations happening on the web.
That equates to economic power because markets are conversations.
I agree with Jason Calacanis that many in the SEO business are trying to game this system, but I disagree when he says the system works. People are trying to game the system because it does not work. It just works better than the previous systems.
I can prove it Jason. I’ll write a better piece on a new cell phone than Engadget and see which shows up higher on Google.
No. Those dynamics are only part of the game.
The richer system envelops us with answers using our data and our network’s data in a chameleon like fashion, never static like Google. That’s child’s play.
Jason(Argonaut) succeeded in getting the Golden Fleece but was fickle and left Medea for another Princess.
Likewise, in the shorter term companies may succeed by amassing link attention.
The true winners won’t be seeking the Golden Fleece at all. They will be removing the barriers and letting the crystal waters flow in, filtered and clean, Pure Conversation.
Library clips talks about the possible clash and resulting noise from conflicting tags in services like Edgeio.
Some time back I emailed Technorati and asked Niall about the conflict of using a full URL as a tag.
It’s difficult if not impossible to do.
And yet that’s what these tags need to be, fully namespaced, so there is no ambiguity about their meaning.
With all the noise (and little signal) about the RSS spec, I thought it would be fun to talk about some real world questions:
OPML+SSE . . . short pause. . . burst of cheer!!
After a break from SSE since the SkinnyFarm experiment, I thought I’d look at OPML.
I remembered that Niall Kennedy had an applescript thingy that exported his NetNewsWire subscription list as OPML+SSE.
Niall needs to convince me that his placement of the sx:sync element is correct.
The spec says:
The most important extension described in this spec is the sx:sync element, which contains the information required for synchronization. This element is a child of the item or outline element. This is a REQUIRED element of all items in all feeds wishing to participate in SSE-based replication.
And here is a snippet of his output:
<outline type="feed" text="Everything TypePad! " htmlUrl="http://www.sixapart.com/typepad/news/" description="Everything TypePad!: " xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/TypePadNews">
<outline type="item" text="Keep in touch by giving the gift of blogging" htmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/TypePadNews?m=85" category="Announcements" created="Wednesday, September 21, 2005 10:15:20 AM"/>
−
<sx :sync id="tag:www.sixapart.com,2005:/typepad/news//24.5956" version="1">
<sx :history when="Wednesday, September 21, 2005 12:09:51 PM" by="NetNewsWire"/>
</sx>
<outline type="item" text="Pick your Pics" htmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/TypePadNews?m=76" category="Features" created="Thursday, August 18, 2005 11:21:17 AM"/>
−
<sx :sync id="tag:www.sixapart.com,2005:/typepad/news//24.5770" version="1">
<sx :history when="Thursday, August 18, 2005 1:10:32 PM" by="NetNewsWire"/>
</sx>
Hmmm. I take the above statement about REQUIRED to mean that every outline element of an OPML doc or every item element of an RSS doc must have an sx:sync id.
And I certainly wouldn’t think that one outline element could have more than one sx:sync child.
I guess I’ll ask the Microsoft RSS guys because there aren’t many examples around.
Niall? Jack? Paresh? Calling Dr. Bombay . . .
Feb 27 2006 09:12 pm |
RSS and
SSE and
OPML and
microsoft and
niallkennedy |
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I wholeheartedly agree with Niall Kennedy on the need for software to be simple.
But I don’t think blogging is difficult, just the concept of what it can do for you.
Everyone understands why they will go and get a Hotmail account and use it as their email.
Not everyone yet understands why they would need to Blog. Many view it as for “writers” or “geeks” or both. Email wasn’t always universal either.
I think the transition will come naturally and will really take off when it becomes “part” of the company intranet .
On your first day you are issed a Blog username and password and automatically subscribed to the HR blog, your department blog etc.
And you begin to communicate.
We are getting there, but it’s true that there are all these seemingly disparate services like posting photos from your cell phone that truly just blogging from another endpoint.
Convergance needs to happen in Web 2.0, it seems, as well.
