Cowbell
I first heard this on Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code, then Dave Slusher linked to it.
Reminds Me of Minority Report
I Love Radio.org points to this interesting new technology that allows billboard content to change based on aggregate data about what people are listening to on their car radios. Cool, or creepy?
Linkblog Concept Revisited
Commenting on my post about Scoble’s linkblog, Ross over at Rosscode.com suggests that Scoble sort his feeds by those that have given him permission to post full posts to his linkblog, and those that haven’t.
Feed permission - what a great idea! It’s too bad that we can’t just assume that content in a syndicated feed has implicitly offered permission, but if we can’t, so be it. I suspect it is a small minority of people that have a problem with their posts being reposted, and if this permission model took off, maybe they could be shown the error of their ways. I grant permission to anyone anywhere on any planet to repost my content as they see fit, as long as they do not alter it in any way, and they provide a link back to the original post. Damn, maybe we are all going to need to license our content under Creative Commons…
Wouldn’t it be cool to subscribe to only the posts on Scoble’s linkblog where permission has been granted to offer full posts? I’d subscribe to that in a second.
I just had a further thought: what if we could put a token in our RSS feeds that indicates that our content is licensed under Creative Commons? That way, the software that runs Scoble’s linkblog could automagically detect whether full content reposts are allowed or not, and act accordingly!
I’d still prefer to only subscribe to the full posts, but I’m sure that could be arranged as well.
Wow - the potential for this is really exciting! Does this idea make sense, or am I spewing cow dung?
[Update] The comments section for my original linkblog post is heating up. What do you think?
RSS Feeds Should Include More Posts
Wow! My last post got linked to by Robert Scoble - the guy who’s blog convinced me it was time for me to start blogging myself. Thank you, Robert.
Interestingly, though, I’ve been taking Robert’s advice and only retrieving my RSS feeds manually, before I go off to read them. I read my subscriptions offline, synchronizing them from NewsGator to my Pocket PC so I can read them anywhere. (Which, by the way, is an extremely cool feature that is only possible using NewsGator, but I’ve never seen them publicize that. Odd!)
But by following this advice, if it wasn’t for my referral logs I’d never have known about his link to me. Not because I don’t read all of Scoble’s posts - I do - but because he only includes the most recent 15 posts in his feed.
Robert, you’re too prolific to have such a short RSS feed! Less than 18 hours passed between synchronizations, yet I completely missed that you had linked to me. What else have I been missing?
Oh, and yes, I do realize that I can customize NewsGator to check for new posts more frequently for certain subscriptions, but I would argue that if content providers want to ensure their content is being read, they ought to ensure their feed is long enough to contain all of their recent posts. Plus, my laptop isn’t always plugged in and turned on - hard to believe, but it’s true!
Sorry Robert, it sounds like I’m complaining about you a lot, and I don’t mean to. Like I said, you convinced me to blog, and for that I’m thankful. I guess you just get more attention because you’re a high-profile blogger - sort of like IE and XP get more attention from hackers because they’re the highest-profile software in their spaces.
The cost of being popular, right? 
Scoble’s Link Blog - Great Idea, But it’s Broken
Robert Scoble’s linkblog is a wonderful idea. And, I do get quite a bit of traffic from it when he has chosen to link to me in the past, so I shouldn’t complain about it. But I’m going to anyway.
The reason I’m going to complain is that while I really love the concept of it, in practise I find it largely unusable. Why? Lack of full text posts. My guess is that Scoble himself wouldn’t subscribe to his own linkblog, as it currently stands. He has written many times about the necessity of full text posts, as he and many other people, such as myself, do the majority of their feed reading offline.
The thing that surprises me is that people actually complained about his original linkblog, where he used the full text of posts that he linked to. This is bizarre to me for a couple of reasons:
RSS for me is the best thing to happen to the Internet, and at the same time the bane of my existence. I suffer from information overload, and wish that I could have the ability to view heavily filtered content, and just skim the cream off the top, if you will. Machine-based filtering isn’t at the point where it will be able to detect the odd, interesting post that doesn’t normally conform to my tastes, but an intelligent human being very well could.
So, while I’d love to read Scoble’s linkblog, it’s totally useless to me when reading offline. And that’s a real shame.
