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Monday, March 4, 2002

10:58:40 PM

My favorite way to read web pages right now isn't really through web pages at all. Web sites have been using RSS to "syndicate" their content for a few years now; all this really means is that they spit out an XML file that contains a list of stories -- titles, description, and links to the full content.

I'd thought about this a little bit when I was on the web-hacker side of the fence, because we used RSS to get content to spin into our own tools. But it hadn't occurred to me what a great tool this is for end-users. Thankfully, it had occurred to other folks, and there are various RSS "newsreaders" that periodically check your set of RSS feeds and present the results to you.

My old solution to this problem, by the way, has been to have a set of bookmarks in drop down menus in the "links" bar. Whenever I was feeling bored, I would pull down the "journals" or "daily" folder and click through five or six different weblogs or news sites and see if there was any fresh memetic tastiness. This approach has served me for several years, but tends to lead to thrashing, as I petulantly reload the same six sites over and over again hoping to force new content to appear by sheer dint of will alone.

So, why RSS aggregation?

No latency. This is a big deal. The aggregator is periodically doing checks in the background, so it doesn't dynamically refresh the content (and force me to wait) everytime I want an update. (On the minus side, my particular aggregrator solution only updates once per hour, but that does tend to discourage me from my obsessive reloading behavior, which I like.)
Standard UI. All of the aggregated stories are displayed as part of the same list. I don't have to mentally shift through fifteen different experience paradigms as I speed surf my thrash list of news sources.
Scales well. It's no big deal for me to track a less frequently (or sporadically) updated news source (like, cough, yours truly) because updates just get inserted into the flow of stories from everyone. Everything's just in one big chronologically sorted list.

Radio Userland has such a feature, and I've discovered that it works quite nicely in conjunction with the "Page Holder" feature of the Mac Internet Explorer. The Page Holder is essentially a little pane on the left side of your browser that holds a web page; when you click in links in that pane, the destinations appear in the main pane. This makes for a very natural navigation -- I just scroll though the list and click on links of interest.

I do have a few gripes. Not everyone has an RSS feed, or if they do, the link isn't obvious. This isn't surprising, this is an evolving area. I give mad props to Radio for making RSS output just as easy as RSS input. Also, I should figure out a way to approach archiving everything; I know Radio's aggregator will do that, but I haven't tried it yet. Specifically, I don't know if the long-term archives are easily searchable. I'd also like more ways to slice & dice my aggregated content -- sorting & searching dynamically. Finally, even thought the UI is consistent, it's still inside of a web browser, and I kind of wish I could get away from that into a more client-oriented user interface. These are minor gripes, though, compared to the boons mentioned above. 1:38:48 AM

In reading Distraction, I came across a reference to the "flower code." Not having just immediately fallen off the turnip truck, I said, "aha! the Victorian Flower Code!" and shot off to google to see if I could find a lexicon and thus decode the clever little in-joke Sterling had placed in the book.

My searches weren't immediately fruitful, which was disappointing, until I discovered I had a terminology problem. The "Victorian Flower Code" was really the The Victorian Language of Flowers.

I'm pretty much posting this to exploit how well ranked I am by Google, so that if anyone else is searching for this, they can find the pointer to the right place. If you did happen to be doing that search, and this helped, let me know :). 1:19:59 AM

I'm reading Distraction by Bruce Sterling and enjoying it thoroughly. I'm not sure why I didn't hear about this book when it came out in 1998. I think this is book is fucking brilliant on multiple levels, and he's doing an excellent job of crafting a future that feels right. If nothing else, his future still feels on track after the oscillations of the last four years or so, so his prognostication stick seems to be working OK so far. More importantly, the storytelling is cohesive and accomplished in a way that many other books in the genre lack. We'll see if I still feel this way when I get done, but so far it's a big thumbs up.

I had a weird temporal experience while sitting in bed reading this book tonight. I was reading about 2044, while using my 2002 iPod, listening to 1970s era Rolling Stones. So the time gap between my entertainments was near to the bulk of an average human lifespan.

I'm on a big Sterling kick right now (just finished rereading Islands in the Net, and I'd listened to and enjoyed Zeitgeist late last year). I'd always kind of avoided Sterling, which has been -- as I'm discovering -- very unfair to him and to me. The problem was that I tried to read Schismatrix as a teenager, and just completely failed to get into it. Twice. And then I read Islands in the Net and got all hung up on how the Net was described in terms of telex and fax. Which is because I was all Mr. "I just got on the Internet a few years ago and I know everything." Now that I revisit the book several years later, it's clear how well he's captured the essence of a distributed, collaborative future. I think the target keeps shifting, but I find the book extremely satisfying now that I have a little more background in what it is he's saying.

Besides, I live in the same town as the man now :). 1:15:21 AM