Speaking of AOL, I'm always amazed at how large companies don't really have to react that fast to threats from better technologies, products or services. In fact in some cases the worst technology actually wins. Email me if you have any suggestions of examples of 'non-design classics' that are still around.

Here's a start:

1. PC Laptops - is it my imagination or, other than Apple, is laptop design actually going backwards?

2. Windows - the original Apple Os was more elegant. We are stuck with impossible uninstalls and no full-text search.

3. Office - I have to fork out $200 just so that I can add comments to other people's Word files -and Powerpoint - aaargh - the greatest crime in design history, a substandard piece of shareware that pollutes the world with blue blends and horrible fonts.

4. AOL - how did a nasty dial-up service to a walled garden network with 'get rich quick' style branding manage not only to survive the Web but acquire a decent media conglomerate?

5. Cadillac - every Cadillac since 1970 looks like a refridgerator on wheels, with a similarly plastic interior and an engine with no engineering finess.

6. VHS - OK DVD's are finally getting rid of this monster that killed Betamax for the consumer market.

7. Cell phone interfaces. OK, you can get a tricked out Java cellphone with a million added widgets, particulalry if you live in Europe or the Far East, but why can't you do simple things like store your address book at the provider end - so that you can move to a new phone (on the same network).

8. Stamps - why don't some mail boxes have franking machines (this personal annoyance is somewhat overcome in the US where you can actually get stamps out of an ATM).

9. Checks - they shouldn't exist unless the bank personally transcribes all the details into account statements so you can see what the hell has been going on with your money.

10. Retail banks - In a parallel universe, I wish that Paypal had brought them all to their knees.

So it seems that as Yahoo has acquired or de facto acquired Inktomi, AltaVista, FAST and Overture in order to compete against Google, Microsoft is building search in-house.

Google has the brand and focus, Yahoo has the community and customers for value-add extras and Microsoft have the ability to easily combine web and desktop/intranet full-text search. But where have AOL been in all this? AOL is looking increasingly vulnerable with no visible plan for search and a dial-up service that looks expensive when compared to broadband.

Here's a thought, regularly I pick up second hand vinyl LP's for $1 from the wondrous Amoeba records.
So why do I have to pay the same per track for MP3s to avoid getting legal action from record companies? What is to stop me buying or selling MP3 tracks 'second hand' for 10c.?

The latest issue of AIR tackles the problem: is Kansas flatter than a pancake?.

"...For example, the earth is slightly flattened at the poles due to the earth's rotation, making its semi-major axis slightly longer than its semi-minor axis, giving a global f of 0.00335. For both Kansas and the pancake, we approximated the local ellipsoid with a second-order polynomial line fit to the cross-sections..."

Great article by Matt Welsh on the disenfranchisement of felons.

"the democratic world's largest pool of adult citizens living under a system of taxation without representation".

I can never manage to label Matt Welsh's politics, which means he must have integrity.

Get a move on Apple - please don't let a crappy half-baked service like BuyMusic.com steal your thunder and get any gullible customers before you launch your Windows music service.

Everything about Buymusic.com looks second rate; its like Tony Soprano hadn't heard of the dotcom crash and thought he could make a few bucks.

And its not just the service that sucks - the marketing manages to rip off Apple's TV ads so badly that you think you're watching a skit on Saturday Night Live, but most of all it's the product that stinks - music you can't listen to on an iPod or burn onto a CD.

I feel better now that I got that off my chest.

Most of the RSS feeds that are around are basically feeds from a single source, and few take advantage of metadata within them. However a few more interesting tweaks are happening. One is on-the-fly RSS generated from a search term.

Wired now allows this and Moreover has been allowing customers to create on-the-fly RSS feeds based on parametric searches over metadata contained in its database for some time. The interesting thing is that a feed based upon a query over metadata, further creates metadata that can enrich the original source. This 'round tripping' of XML metadata potentially allows for enriching information as it flows around the web - this round tripping can be an infinite virtuous circle.

As a simple example: Suppose an RSS feed contains the full content of articles and an on-the-fly RSS feed can be created by searching this full content. If you create an RSS feed of articles mentioning the term '80211.b', then all articles returned can have a topic tag attached that labels them as being about 'wireless', based upon a thesaurus lookup. Tagging the articles with this metadata as a topic is enriching the original source with further metadata.

Yesterday I had an unexpected treat from a friend, Addy, who gave me a full tour around Ideo in Palo Alto. This tour made me wistful of architecture, so many tech offices are so boring or like Google's HQ, have slightly forced and oh so obvious eccentricity - bean bags and lava lamps and a Segway.

Ideo, like many design operations has a real feel of creativity, an Exploratorium for grown ups - it has all the toys, from video editing suites, photographic studios, model shops, paint shops, electronics assembling etc. but there are some nice touches. Everywhere you look, gleaming high-tech bicycles hang from the ceiling - each desk has a pulley to hoist your bike above your desk and drawers full of high tech goodies are scattered around the office. My favorite of these was the 'tech box' which had drawers marked 'cool mechanisms' and 'amazing materials' full of - well what they said. All the items within were catalogued and could be looked up in a database via the intranet.

The highlight, however, was a demo of a thing called a Sound Spotlight - an invention that Ideo have been given the task to productize. A foot square rectangular box, rather like a speaker, is attached to a CD player - in this case playing bird noises. Point the box at any surface and the sound appears to emanate from the surface rather than the box. By moving the box in our hands we had a flock of birds appearing to be nesting in the rafters 50 feet away and then in the palm of my hand a second later.

"BERLIN (Reuters) - A giant catfish that ate a dog and terrorized a German lake for years has washed up dead".

So much better than a 'man bites dog' story.

Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage

Apparently Mark Twain used to call his immaculate white linen outfits his 'don't give a damn' suits.

Jeff Jarvis blogs verbatim and tears apart a sub editor's changes to an article for a 'scholarly journal'.

"Aw, to hell with it. I decided to just put the piece up here, for you are the audience I care about, not the handful of insular souls who'll read a self-referential, self-reverential faux scholarly periodical about weblogs".

I have this fantastic image of a drab, librarian-type cowering behind a stack of old books, dust flying, as a 6' 4" Jarvis in a don't give a damn suit slams his original manuscript on the top of the pile. Weblogs allow you to do that - but without getting dust on your jacket.

BuzzMachine... by Jeff Jarvis

One of the treats of the last O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference was to see Matt Jones' excellent presentation design (along with some on stage air-guitar antics).

Within software, design is often treated either as a superficial veneer or as a reductionist process where aesthetics seem to disappear altogether. Unlike Jakob Nielsen, people like Jason Kottke and Matt Jones are true information architects.

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In some ways RSS could be accused of being the Emperors New Clothes of standards - the acronym has more than one meaning (including the Hindu Nationalist one), there are multiple versions, extending it via modules makes its use as generic as XML itself, and if you normalize the data flowing around in RSS, then the lowest common denominator is some text with a link surrounding it - hardly metadata, more like hypertext links. But to some extent, all standards are like the Emperors New Clothes in that they are not so much about specs and technical precision, but the virtual mindset that they occupy and the people and tools that use them. To this end, RSS is a winning meme, people outside of the grass roots weblog community are starting to talk about and use it and RSS 2.0 passes the good enough test (with a couple of tweaks IMHO) for applications beyond headline syndication.

There are many things that (Not)Atom is doing that are absolutely necessary and very good from a technical perspective, but from a market perspective, surely it would be better if Atom worked around a core of RSS and if need be then the RSS 2.0 core should be amended to include necessary things like the encoding type of content.

A year or so ago the name actually wasn't important, but now RSS is: 1. on the radar of the content management companies, Vignette, Interwoven, Documentum; 2. being output within services from hubs such as AOL; 3. being syndicated by media organizations such as the BBC.

In as much as weblogs are more important than online journals - that they show the way that information can be published, re-purposed, re-routed and re-formatted to be viewable on any networked device in real-time, anywhere and searchable with SQL-like precision using metadata encoded in XML, then the standards for weblog publishing, syndication and change notification are important for how things will be published and searched on the web. If everything on the web were published using the emerging weblog method then the web would be searchable like a database and return anything as soon as it was available. Google will never be able to do this by crawling the web.

There is a risk that if RSS has captured mind-share outside of the weblog community then Atom, without an RSS payload, may be perceived as a weblog only format, if only because people outside of the this community will be confused.

What I like most about this is that the latest version of Lindows runs off a CD so there is no need to install the OS and you can run it on a machine with another OS installed without having to mess around with dual boot settings.

Techweb > News > Lindows Powers $169 Web-centric PC > Lindows Powers $169 Web-Centric PC

A few days ago Tony Blair had possibly reached his zenith. basking in 17 standing ovations before congress. How quickly things change. Today the BBC reports on the scandal surrounding the suicide of the WMD report whistle blower:

"Governments have fallen and prime ministerial careers have collapsed over less."

Even members of Blair's own party are calling for his resignation. The most likely outcome is that Blair's spin doctor and/or defence secretary will resign, but if the UK governement falls because of a scandal surrounding false evidence over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, then Bush may have a problem.

BBC NEWS | Politics | Kelly death 'changes everything'

The French language police have decided that people shouldn't use the word email but instead the term courriel, based on courrier electronique which they claim has common currency. Unless you check Google.fr of course.

So here's a thought - France has a lot to offer, without its language - it's famous for Food and drink and sex for gods sake - and the English (read American - this is not a patriotic rant) language accepts this: restaurant, beverage, embrace.

A siege mentality about the French language doesn't really preserve French culture at all, in fact if anything it prevents its appeal spreading - from the lack of a French originated point of view during the Iraq war (due to lack of english language transalations of French newspapers, most french opinion was propogated through anti-French, english speaking commentators) to the absence of decent cheese, manadatory kissing and high-speed railroads in the US.

So why not concede on the 'oh shit American English is becoming the Lingua Franca' and spread the amour instead. After all, even the word 'courriel' originates from North America, having been coined by a Canadian professor.

Recherche Google: "courrier electronique" 449,00 results.

Recherche Google: "e-mail" 2.6 million results. Email porduces 2.1 million.

For the record, I am onboard with Dave's move to take RSS to the next level and appointing Brent Simmons and Jon Udell to an advisory board. At some point it would be good if this went through a standards organization like the W3C, however. I would suggest that it would be good if all RSS development focuses around a 2.0 core and that the developer community focus on RSS modules on the one hand and a message wrapper for RSS content based upon weblog API's on the other. With this any RSS 1.0 community work or Atom (Echo) work should fold into this arena.

RSS 2.0 meets the requirement that I see as key (extensibility through modules) and any fragmentation of effort will be counter productive.

There is plenty of work to do with defining modules and message wrappers - and to that I would add 'ping' server architecture, where the value of real-time information will demonstrate what a weblog published/RSS syndicated model can do what current search engines with nothing fresher than 15 minutes cannot - a Reuters for everyone.

Technology at Harvard Law: Advisory Board

Something interesting is happening in the world of online identities. The end goal is clear - a distributed, decentralized identity system where people have control over their own identity online - a people's 'Passport' or what Marc Canter envisages as a people's DNS. The problem is how to get there. Perhaps it will happen, in part, from the ground up through small steps such as personal data in systems such as Technorati or one line bio's as personal RSS headlines? In fact, in true Dave Sifry style, Technorati seems to already be moving along these lines: see Technorati Profiles and check out the picture.

Over the longer term, this is perhaps as ground breaking as what weblogs have done for web publishing and ultimately will leverage the weblog model to its full potential by creating a parry to content through people's interests and requirements, creating a marketplace for RSS.

Andrew Goodman deconstructs the latest search engine stats:

Google Sites 32%
Yahoo! Sites 25%
AOL Time Warner 19%
MSN-Microsoft Sites 15%
Ask Jeeves 3%

"Since Google powers both Yahoo Search and AOL Search, if you assign the lion's share of searches on those portal properties to Google, you arrive at the conclusion that Google might be powering 60-70% of all online searches."

The searches numbers are almost irrelevant, however - Google won't have a deal with Yahoo forever, and it won't be getting any ad derived cash, so the paid search (Adwords etc.) numbers are more interesting:

Google Network 54%
Overture Network 45%

As Andrew points out, are Findwhat and Looksmart really just a rounding error blip? Something weird here.

Traffick | Minding the Search Engines' Business

I had figured that "Overture get bought by Yahoo or Microsoft within a year."

Search engine showdown.

So after the consolidation amongst the algorithmic search the paid for search space is also coagulating around the principal search destinations.

The major hubs of the web will now be Yahoo, Google and MSN, but MSN seem to be playing a waiting game, perhaps they are arming internally, ready for a battle royal.

Jon's Udell nails it with his analysis of wrapper technology for weblog content:

"I like its RESTian purity, though I'd also be open to a SOAP variant that could optionally leverage all of the authorization and routing machinery"

I wonder if it can be proved that any 2 dimentional SOAP message can be represented entirely as a 1 dimentional URL of a certain length. I suspect that this is the case, and if so, then the only thing that the REST model does not allow is to create a secure login mechanism that blocks access proactively. The REST model requires retroactively blocking access based upon IP address.

In which case, perhaps you could have a URL encoded wrapper for RSS feeds, with a generic SOAP login wrapper if required. Perverse perhaps, but useful.

In either case, the specification for the wrapper of weblog content should not specify the format used - i.e. it should be able to be represented in SOAP or as a URL. To allow this means not merely separating the message from the envelope, but the envelope from its routing and security specification.

Authentication should not be part of the wrapper specification for weblog content.

I'm not really interested in the politics of Echo, however, no matter what happens, a year or two from now we will have the way that publishing and aggregation works on the web nailed (most probably when Microsoft decide on what to adopt) - a development as important as the adoption of HTML and the web browser. This may include the Metaweblog API and RSS or a combined effort with a new XML schema in a SOAP wrapper.

To my mind there is no problem in making RSS as is the default payload for SOAP content. A few tweaks that Echo already has would allow typing - e.g. avoiding the current madness where the mime type of the full content is not specified.

So what are the missing bits?

On the detailed level: RSS content is so unnormalized as to be almost useless for commercial applications. To build a searchable index of RSS content you need access to the full text of stories - and commercial publications are not going to syndicate the full text of stories - but you don't need to syndicate the full text of stories to index them. Encouraging the use of tokenized full text (i.e. remove stop words such as and, or, the etc.) allows for machines to index full articles but leaves humans to visit original publishers sites for the full article. This should be the default content of a 'content' tag and needs to be built into the default output from weblog publishing tools.

On the medium scale: because of arguments over the RSS core, not enough focus has been made on tools to create modules and allow extensibility. Forms need to be built into applications such as Userland's, Blogger and Moveable Type's to allow end user creation of RSS modules within a users namespace and without having to have users have any need to know about the underlying XML. Rapid adoption of modules will take syndicated content beyond the headline/link pair that is the only metadata currently being syndicated in any volume.

On the larger scale: content and the weblog API are two parts of the whole - most important of all perhaps is the ping server and related specs. In order to build personalized aggregators of real-time information, all of a weblog post needs to go to a neutral third party ping server and the ping server needs top have an API that allows clients to be alerted of changes in real time without having to scrape the ping server. Do this and you don't have 15 minute old Google aggregated news but real time news - the stuff that people like Reuters know the value of.

Given the importance of the standards for publishing on the web, there needs to be a formal body with founder members such as Userland, Moveable Type and Blogger. There is no money to be made out of the standards themselves, but a great deal to be lost if they are not agreed on by everyone. Without a body lead by the weblog publishing tools their efforts will be userped by whatever the big co's decide to use.

FrontPage - Sam Ruby's Wiki

Weblogs are different from threaded discussion groups or mailing lists. They allow you to carry out a distributed discussion where the thread can be assembled remotely using an analysis tool such as Technorati. The advantage is that weblogs are personal, down to the look and feel of an individual blog, with all the functionality of a threaded discussion implicitly available.

To add comments within someone else's weblog is surely a retrograde step? In true trackback style the comments box should pull up a list of references to the post from Technorati - with a box that posts to your own blog or signs you up to start one.

The Guardian has chosen 'a blogger' an anonymous representative of the weblogging community as one of its top 100 influential people in the UK media industry.

MediaGuardian.co.uk | Top 100 | 94. A blogger

MSNBC have finally had to sack Michael Savage for suggesting that a caller who he believed was gay should "get AIDS and die".

During the Iraq war Savage was used as a pundit as part of a crude attempt by MSNBC to imitate Fox's gung ho stance and cash in on their ratings success.

Firing savage is right, but wasn't hiring someone with openly held fascist and racist ideas for a mainstream slot, on a channel that blanches at the idea of a shot of a nipple, clearly wrong in the first place. That Savage should go is obvious - but those responsible for hiring him at MSNBC should also go. Savage did not act out of character, and those who chose him knew what they had bought into.

Savage, like many people who are motivated by hatred, has a chip on his shoulder as a failed academic rejected by liberal Berkeley. I can't help being reminded of a failed painter who turned his bitterness into resentment of the race of many of the successful painters around him.

MSNBC fires Michael Savage

People pay a great deal of money for software when there is often an open source alternative for free. There is, quite literally, an 'open source' of tap water in most kitchens but people spend more than $7 billion annually on something that would cost less than $1M if they used the open source.

This month's skeptic has some great trivia on the ultimate scam: selling bottled water in countires where the 'open source' is just fine...

"25 percent or more of bottled water is really just tap water in a bottle--sometimes further treated, sometimes not. If the label says 'from a municipal source' or 'from a community water system,' it's tap water. "

"[the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's] bottled water quality standards are the same as [the Environmental Protection Agency's] tap water standards."

but...

"bottled water is subject to less rigorous purity standards and less frequent tests for bacteria and chemical contaminants than those required of tap water"

"Both companies [Coke and Pepsi] charge more for their plain water than for their sugar water."

"the Showtime television series Penn & Teller: Bullshit! The hosts began with a blind comparison in which 75 percent of New Yorkers preferred city tap to bottled waters."
Scientific American: Bottled Twaddle -- Is bottled water tapped out?