Category: Media

Been a while since I updated my RSS aggregator, NetNewsWire. Went to do that today only to find that it had been purchased by NewsGator. Great, I thought – here goes another simple/fast/excellent tool, about to be ruined by upstream acquisition. Stoked to find that not only is NNW basically the same product as ever, but NewsGator has done a brilliant job of integrating desktop code into their online service.

First launch required me to create an account on newsgator.com, then allowed me to sync my locally stored feeds to them. At home, was able to do the same and merge my subscriptions into the same collection, giving me access to one constellation of feeds from both work and home.

Icing: NewsGator’s web UI lets me browse the same collection from any browser. The power and smoothness of desktop apps, the universal access of a web app. Nice to see a merger gone right for a change.

Technorati Tags: newsgator, sync, rss

The collaborative comment spam filtering database Akismet has drastically improved the game for me over the past few months, but until recently, it worked only with WordPress. Just days after I switched from MovableType to WP, I was contacted to help with a secret beta test of a version of Akismet for MT. Since I could no longer run that test on this blog, I deployed it on John Battelle’s Searchblog and Mary Hodder’s Napsterization, two of Birdhouse’s hardest-hit installations. After identifying some bugs and an initial rocky start, the plugin started kicking some serious butt.

Today Akismet/MT went public — ironically at the same time some independent coders developed their own versions. So far, the only thing that seems to hang it up are scoring conflicts with other installed systems. For example, if you have MT set to score +1 for a comment containing less than three links, but Akismet flags a comment as spam and ranks it -1, the two scores cancel each other out. But those are minor bumps.

Unfortunately Akismet isn’t quite the true golden egg in terms of reducing server load, though it does help. My comments on that topic here.

Spammers listen up: There are a whole lot more of us than there are of you, and it’s really hard to imagine you figuring out how to game this system. You don’t stand a chance.

Technorati Tags: akismet, akismet.com

Despite the release of the StyleCatcher plugin for Movable Type more than a year ago, the number of freely downloadable styles available for easy implementation in MT is tiny compared to the vast directories of installable templates for WordPress.

Looks like Six Apart is aiming to rectify the situation, leveraging financial incentives where community spirit has for some reason failed. The Style Contest is offering $17,000 in prizes to MT/TypePad-compatible style designers. In a way, it’s a shame that it will take money to do what the WP/open source community has done so well for free. On the other hand, this is a great opportunity for some of the more handsome MT sites out there to get some juice for their efforts.

Trying to come to some understanding of all this recent discussion about attention vs. intention vs. old-school eyeballs. Cluetrain, 1999: “We are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. We are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. Deal with it.” Doc Searles’ wife: “Sales is real. Marketing is bullshit.” Nick Bradbury: “Right now we’re witnessing the growth of services who provide aggregated attention data, and statistics suggested by this data will increasingly impact those of us – journalists and techies alike – who hope to survive in the online world.” Mary Hodder, excerpted from notes on her decision to join the board of Attention Trust:

What’s the difference between the static web and the live web? Participation.

What’s the difference between consumers and users/amateurs? Participation.

What’s the difference between attention and eyeballs? Participation.

So as we move from an eyeball-centric to an attention-centric web, and as companies realize the value of harnessing and harvesting individual attention streams, we (users/readers/consumers) stand to benefit. BUT it also becomes critical to retain control over our own databases of intention (attention?), lest they be used against us.

Gearing up for another big work week — once again we’re hosting a compressed version of our multimedia training program for mid-career journalists. Sandwiched between training sessions are a series of talks by journalists and thinkers, including John Battelle, Bob Cauthorn, Dan Gillmor, Craig Newmark, and others. The talks are open to the public and will be webcast live, with archived versions scheduled to go online the following week.

The irony of using supposedly time-saving aggregators and services like Reddit, Digg, Delicious, Populicious, RSS readers, etc. is that they don’t save you any time at all if you’re not disciplined in your application of them — otherwise you quickly lose any time advantage by filling the void with more and more feeds. Daniel Miessler:

One of the main problems we as information fetishists face is the lack of a solid, repeatable methodology for processing new input online. Too often we bounce back and forth between this site and that site, maybe check a blog or two, and then half-heartedly label the task of “reading news” as completed. This approach is not only a really poor way to stay on top of what’s new, but it’s also very anti-GTD.

Miessler has written up his personal methodology of news consumption as a sort of guide. Some good tips there, but not sure I could ever swing that way – for me, the fun of the surf is in bouncing around with some element of randomness. I seem to be attracted to exactly the behavior that Miessler finds inefficient.

Got some great feedback at SXSW about the weekly Birdhouse email updates… ironically just after I broke them by switching to WordPress. Took a look around at available plugins to replicate the functionality in WP, but came up short, so last night modified my mtblogmail script to work with WordPress (as wpblogmail, of course). E-mail updates should resume this Sunday night, and the Subscribe box has been restored to the sidebar. Not sure whether I’ll release wpblogmail as a public script… will take some cleaning up and rejiggering to get it ready.

Also got a number of comments about the current generic theme we’re using here — this is a temporary thing, and I’m still officially Naked in Public until I get some variant of the old theme really nailed down.