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Sunday, March 14, 2004
Anomalous food chain event 
The point tippeth over
The sausage behind Pax Americana
The Aggregation Point
| | Which means it's going to be hard to get me to shut up for a while about it. |
| | What will make this work (or not work) is that we don't yet have an amazon, ebay, yahoo or google of RSS. It's still too homemade. |
| | Of course, there isn't a "Google of RSS" because Google has gone with Atom for its Blogger feeds. (Here they explain why.) |
| | RSS is all about what's changing NOW. Its almost like being on the end of a live Retuers' feed, only for topics that I actually care about. Once the readers get better, and the content becomes more public-friendly (ie, why can't I get CNN feeds, or NZ Herald for that matter....), RSS (and syndication in general) should explode. Its nearly there now..... |
| | We've developed and continue to develop new ways to refine information using the tools of the Web. That's why (I think) librarians are so excited about weblogs, RSS and the Web in general. |
| | Here's another reason librarians will love RSS: its sources, still mostly blogs, are mindful of their archival nature. See that calendar to the right there (if you're reading this in a browser rather than an aggregator)? That item, a grid of links to dated archives, illustrates what is perhaps the most meaninful distinction about the breed of document we're syndicating here. See, blogs are written with the intent of living in the Web's stacks as cataloged and searchable archives, organized by sensible schemas. Ordinary Web sites forget their past when they are updated. As publications, they're more like billboards or posters than like books, because their old copies vanish when new ones replace them. They paper over the past. |
| | Imagine for a moment if retail catalogs were syndicated with RSS and not just "put up" on the Web. New copies would notify next-generation "live web" search engines, which could archive them as well. Old copies would remain up and available in dated archives, much as (literally) dated blog entries have been since the late 90s. |
| | Which means the periodicals section of the vast library we call the Web may be the first to to have a directory that isn't a categorical tree with rotting links at the ends of its branches, or a volatile inventory of stuff that just happens to show up in the stacks. |
9rms, 4.5ba, deck, pool, gargoyles, ocean vu
| | For our renovated Spanish house we had Walt Watson, an artist who does amazing stuff with metal, design fixtures and gates that weave themes of gargoyles and grape vines. The gargoyle sconces in the entry hallway and up the spiral stairs in the turret give the place a look which, while borrowing from tasteful traditions, combine to produce something of a first. I call it "vintner's gothic." |
| | Yesterday evening, while I was out with the kid, my wife and one of our good friends finished putting away the boxes that littered the hallways, then deploying tasteful decorating elements on furniture and walls and into various niches. Then they turned the lights down low, left the classical music playing softly in all the rooms, and headed out to a late dinner. |
| | They were gone when the kid and I arrived home to find the place looking, for the first time, fabulous. (And suitable for selling, which is the idea. If you're looking for a very nice Spanish hillside home on America's Riviera, with an "infinity" pool, a "four island" view across town and out to the Pacific, plus plenty of bandwidth, talk to us.) |
| | We walked from room to room admiring our new finished home, remarking about how nice the floor looked now that it wasn't littered with paint cans, and how the exposed beams, stripped of paint applied in the 1930s, made the Great Room seem worthy of the name. |
| | As we began walking up the stairs past its series of gargoyles, the kid offered a surprisingly acerbic review: "It was supposed to look like Hogwarts, but now it looks like a hotel." |
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