While at ETech I got to spend about half an hour chatting with Steve Gillmor about what he's called "the attention problem" which isn't the same thing as the attention.xml specification. The attention problem is the problem that faces every power users of XML syndication clients such as RSS Bandit or Bloglines. It is so easy to subscribe to various feeds that eventually readers get overwhelmed by the flood of information hitting their aggregator's inbox. Some have used the analogy "drinking from a firehose" to describe this phenomenon.

This problem affects me as well which is the impetus for a number of features in the most recent release of RSS Bandit such as newspaper views which allow one to view all the unread posts in a feed in single pane, adding more sortable columns such as author and comment count to the list view, and skim mode ('mark all items as read on exiting a feed or category'). However the core assumption behind all these features is that the user is reading every entry.

Ideally a user should be able to tell a client, "Here are the sites I'm interested in, here are the topics I'm interested in, and now only show me stuff I'd find interesting or important". This is the next frontier of features for RSS/ATOM aggregators and an area I plan to invest a significant amount of time in for the next version of RSS Bandit.

In my post Some Opinions on the Attention.xml Specification I faulted the attention.xml specification because it doesn't seem to solve the problems it sets out to tackle and some of the data in the format is unrealistic for applications to collect. After talking to Steve Gillmor I realize another reason I didn't like the attention.xml spec; it ignores all the hard problems and assumes they've been solved. Figuring out what data or what algorithms are useful for determining what items are relevant to a user is hard. Using said data to suggest new items to the user is hard. Coming up with an XML format for describing an arbitrary set of data that could be collected by an RSS aggregator is easy.

There are a number of different approaches I plan to explore over the next few months in various alphas of the Nightcrawler release of RSS Bandit.  My ideas have run the gamut from using Bayesian filtering to using the Technorati link cosmos feature for weighting posts [in which case I'd need batch methods which is something I briefly discussed with Kevin Marks at Etech last week]. There is also weighting by author that needs to be considered, for example I read everything written by Sam Ruby and Don Box. Another example is a topic that may be mundane (e.g. what I had for lunch) and something I'd never read if published by a stranger but would be of interest to me if posted by a close friend or family member.

We will definitely need a richer extensibility model so I can try out different approaches [and perhaps others can as well] before the final release. Looks like I have yet another spring and summer spent indoors hacking on RSS Bandit to look forward to. :)

 

I woke up this morning to find an interesting bit of Web history posted in a comment in response my post SOA, AJAX and REST: The Software Industry Devolves into the Fashion Industry by Adam Bosworth. He wrote

I actually agree with the post and I could care less what it is called (Ajax or DHTML or ..) but I thought I'd correct a couple of historical points. We (I led the IE MSFT 4.0 team which shipped in the fall of 97) called it DHTML because we introduced the read and writable DOM so that Ecmascript could dynamically modify the page to react to fine grained user actions and asynchronous events. That really was new and inventing this and the term occured simultaneously. Scott Isaac drove this work and worked tirelessly to get it into the W3C. We (MSFT) had a sneak preview for many developers in the fall of 96 actually showing things like pages expanding and collapsing in the gmail style and Tetris running using Javascript and DHTML in the page. Before then, javascript could hide/unhide items and react to some coarse events, but that was about it. We added the XMLHTTPRequest object (Chris Lovett actually did this) in IE 5.0 when we wrote the auction demo to show how XML could be used with IE to build a new interactive client. If there was a pioneer for Ajax, I'd argue that the auction demo was it.

I am surprised by how familiar I am with some of the people he mentions. Chris Lovett is currently an architect on the XML team at Microsoft and was the person who gave me the Extreme XML column on MSDN when I was still fresh out of college in my few months at Microsoft. Scott Isaacs is an architect on the MSN Spaces team who I've been in a few design meetings with so far. Cool.

I also see that Adam is back posting to his blog with his post Tensions on the Web. He mentions our conversation at ETech, specifically

I haven't posted for quite a while because my last posts caused unfair attacks on Google by twisting the words I'd used in my posts and attributing my posts to Google. I want to be really clear about something. The opinions I express in this Blog are my own. They have nothing to do with Google's opinions. Google only asks that I not leak information about future products. Period. But despite that, recent blog posts of mine were used to attack Google and this upset me deeply. Much to my surprise, Dare Obasanjo came up to me and told me, after some fairly vitriolic complaining from me to him about this earlier state of affairs, that he wished I'd continue to post. I thought about this over the weekend and decided that to some degree, you have to take your chances in this environment rather than just hide when you don't like the behavior and that perhaps I was being over sensitive anyway. There are too many interesting things going on right now anyway.

Adam's blog postings have been somewhat inspirational to me and part of the reason I decided to move to MSN (in fact, I'd considered leaving Microsoft). They also led to the most popular entry in my blog, Social Software is the Platform of the Future. It's good to see that he's back to sharing his ideas with us all.

Welcome back to the blogosphere, Adam.

 

Ever since the article Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications unleashed itself on the Web I've seen the cacophony of hype surrounding Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (aka AJAX reach thunderous levels. The introduction to the essay already should make one wary about the article, it begins

Ajax isnt a technology. Its really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:

• standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
• dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model ;
• data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT ;
• asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest ;
• and JavaScript binding everything together.

So AJAX is using Javascript and XML with the old new twist being that one communicates with a server using Microsoft's proprietary XmlHttpRequest object. AJAX joins SOA in ignominy as yet another buzzword created by renaming existing technologies which becomes a way for some vendors to sell more products without doing anything new. I agree with Ian Hixie's rant Call an apple an apple where he wrote

Several years ago, HTML was invented, and a few years later, JavaScript (then LiveScript, later officially named ECMAScript) and the DOM were invented, and later CSS. After people had been happily using those technologies for a while, people decided to call the combination of HTML, scripting and CSS by a new name: DHTML. DHTML wasn't a new technology it was just a new label for what people were already doing.

Several years ago, HTTP was invented, and the Web came to be. HTTP was designed so that it could be used for several related tasks, including:

• Obtaining a representation of a resource from a remote host using that resource's identifier (GET requests).
• Executing a procedure call on a remote host using a structured set of arguments (POST requests).
• Uploading a resource to a remote host (PUT requests).
• Deleting a resource from a remote host (DELETE requests).

People used this for many years, and then suddenly XML-RPC and SOAP were invented. XML-RPC and SOAP are complicated ways of executing remote procedure calls on remote hosts using a structured set of arguments, all performed over HTTP.

Of course you'll notice HTTP can already do that on its own, it didn't need a new language. Other people noticed this too, but instead of saying "hey everyone, HTTP already does all this, just use HTTP", they said, "hey everyone, you should use REST!". REST is just a name that was coined for the kind of architecture on which HTTP is based, and, on the Web, simply refers to using HTTP requests.

Several years ago, Microsoft invented XMLHttpRequest. People used it, along with JavaScript and XML. Google famously used it in some of their Web pages, for instance GMail. All was well, another day saved... then someone invented a new name for it: Ajax.
...
So I have a request: could people please stop making up new names for existing technologies? Just call things by their real name! If the real name is too long (the name Ajax was apparently coined because "HTTP+XML+HTML+XMLHttpRequest+JavaScript+CSS" was too long) then just mention the important bits. For example, instead of REST, just "HTTP"; instead of DHTML just "HTML and script", and instead of Ajax, "XML and script".

What I find particularly disappointing about the AJAX hype is that it has little to do with the technology and more to do with the quality of developers building apps at Google. If Google builds their next UI without the use of XML but only Javascript and HTML will we be inundiated with hype about the new JUDO approach (Javascript and Unspecified DOm methods) because it uses proprietary DOM extensions not in the W3C standard?

The software industry perplexes me. One minute people are complaining about standards compliance in various websites and browsers but the next minute Google ships websites built on proprietary Microsoft APIs and it births a new buzzword. I doubt that even the fashion industry is this fickle and inconsistent.

Postscript: I wasn't motivated to post about this topic until I saw the comments to the post Outlook Web Access should be noted as AJAX pioneer  by Robert Scoble. It seems some people felt that Outlook Web Access did not live up to the spirit of AJAX. Considering that the distinguishing characteristic of the AJAX buzzword is using XmlHttpRequest and Outlook Web Access is the reason it exists (the first version was written by the Exchange team) I find this highly disingenious. Others have pointed this out as well, such as Robert Sayre in his post Ever Wonder Why It's Called "XMLHTTPRequest"?

 

Last night, we put the finishing touches on an upgrade to the server-side of MSN Messenger. The maximum size of a buddy list has been increased from 150 to 300. Enjoy.
 

TDavid has a post critical of MSN Spaces where he writes  I think it's about time for another MSN Spaces update.

I'm starting to lose interest in MSN Spaces as a blogging tool.

Some of the future features that have been hinted at like the ability to host a spaces at our own domain like blogger does need to come to fruition to revitalize my interest in this service. I purchased a domain for this very purpose months ago and they sit, collectin dust.

Not just me though, I don't hear many others talking about MSN Spaces any more either. I know the target audience isn't regular bloggers, but just people who want to have a journal, but if Microsoft really wants MSN Spaces to compete with blogger then they need to add the ability to run off their own domain and open up the template customization a lot more.

Otherwise this will become -- maybe it already is -- just a glorified diary for sharing notes, pictures and music playlists with family and friends.

I'll let Mike talk about upcoming features, site updates and the like. There is one thing, I would like to address though. If people view MSN Spaces as a place for people to share their words, music and images with their friends and family then it would be fulfilling our goals for the site and I'd view it as an unbridled success. In my post entitled Why MSN Spaces and not MSN Blogs? I wrote

As to why they are called "spaces" as opposed to "blogs" it is because we believe there is more to sharing one's experiences online than your online journal. People want to share their thoughts, their favorite music, their favorite books, pictures of their loved ones and so on. It isn't just  posting your thoughts and experiences in the reverse chronological order which is what typically defines a "weblog". It's supposed to be a person's personal space online which was the original vision of personal publishing on the Web which spawned the personal homepage revolution a couple of years ago. Weblogs are the next iteration of that vision and we expect MSN Spaces to be the refinement of that iteration.

MSN Spaces is designed to allow people to create textual and visual diaries of their lives to share with others. We aren't the only one's that believe this as is evidenced by competing services such as Yahoo! 360° which has borrowed a leaf or two from our book. I'm curious as to what other goals a weblogging service could have?

 

A few days ago I wrote a post entitled Bringing Affirmative Action to Blogging where I jokingly asked whether we would need a blaggercon conference for black bloggers. Less than a week later I found out there was a blogging while black panel at the SXSW conference via Nancy White's blog. The blogged transcript of the panel interesting.

Another thing I found interesting was the ratio of men to women at the panel which Nancy White put at 28:80 (35%) which is quite impressive for a technology conference. This compares unfavorably with the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference which a number of women in technology have criticized for being heavily male dominated. These posts include SXSW, why i attended and marginalized populations by Danah Boyd, why sxsw by Liz Lawley and Number 9 Number 9 Number 9 by Shelley Powers. These posts mainly point out that given that both ETech and SXSW were being held at the same time, it seems many women chose the latter over the former. Funny enough, while I did get the feeling that there were way too many white guys at ETech even for a technology conference I wasn't thinking "where are the women?" but instead "where are all the Indian men?". I guess that reveals something about me.

Speaking of conferences,  I did find Dave Winer's post on two-level communities to be quite interesting. Specifically

Last week there were two conferences that I didn't go to but followed through the Web. I could have gone to either of them in person, if I had been willing to pay their fees, and been willing to be in the audience or the hallways, at all times. In other words, I would have to accept my place as a second-level person, an outsider, in the presence of insiders...I remember well what it was like going to Esther's conferences in the 80s, when the insiders all had someone to eat with, and I was paying thousands of dollars for the priviledge of eating by myself because I didn't know anyone.

There's also a post in a similar vein from a participant at SXSW entitled How it feels to be an outsider which goes into more detail about what it feels like to be an outsider at one of these conferences.

Personally I got a lot of value out of ETech. From a technical perspective, I got first hand proof that REST is sweeping SOAP+WSDL as the technology of choice for building Web services from a diverse and knowledgeable set of folks.  From a personal networking perspective I got to chat with Sam Ruby, Steve Gillmor, Anil Dash, Brad Fitzpatrick, Ben Trott, Erik Benson, Adam Bosworth (the conversation was very interesting, expect more about this in a later post), Marc Canter, Kevin Marks, Jeremy Zawodny, Nelson Minar and a bunch of other people. Then there's the fact that I got to spend time hanging out with folks from work outside of meetings and email discussions.

I find it surprising that there are people who go to conferences to attend talks and 'eat by themselves'. However thinking about it now there definitely is a certain clique-like feel to the entire technology conference scene which I'm sure extends to academic and professional conferences as a while.

 

Steve Rider, one of the great folks behind start.com, has started a category on his blog devoted to the site. His first post discusses some of the changes they've made to the site in the past week. He writes

As soon as I finish this post I'll be digging in my heels for the afternoon and working on OPML import support and increasing the number of headlines per feed.  Hey, what are rainy Sunday afternoons for?

Here are some of the improvements we've made since we were "discovered" a week and a half ago:

Start.com/1

• Full Firefox support
• Migrated from cookie-based solution to back-end store for feeds and preferences
• Removed the restriction on the number of feeds that can be added
• Added ability to delete items from My Feeds and Recent Searches
• Title of module is now hyperlinked (oops) and also gets updated if the title in the RSS feed is different
• Show search history in correct order
• Lots of fit and finish and minor cosmetic changes

Start.com/2

• Fixed a few problems with the ActiveX control that were causing boomarks not to be imported (there are still a couple of issues affecting some users)
• Added OPML import support
• Increased performance when fetching from server by making more async calls

One of the features I asked Steve for was OPML import so it's good to see that it's already being added to the site. I didn't realize how fast they'd be turning around on feature requests. Looks like I should dust off my list of feature requests for online aggregators and swing by Steve's office sometime this week. Sweet.

 

This is the final release of the version formerly codenamed "Wolverine". This is the most significant release to date and has a ton of cool features. Enjoy.

Download the installer from here. Differences between v1.2.0.117 and v1.3.0.26 below.

FEATURES:

Newspaper styles: Ability to view all unread posts in feeds and categories or all posts in a search folder in a Newspaper view. This view uses templates that are in the same format as those used by FeedDemon so one can use RSS Bandit newspaper styles in FeedDemon and vice versa. One can choose to specify a particular stylesheet for a given feed or category. For example, one could use the slashdot.fdxsl stylesheet for viewing Slashdot, headlines.fdxsl for viewing news sites in the News category and outlook-express.fdxsl for viewing blog posts.

Column Chooser: Ability to specify which columns are shown in the list view from a choice of Headline, Topic, Date, Author, Comment Count, Enclosures, Feed Title and Flag. One can choose to specify a column layout for a particular feed or category. For example, one could use the layout {Headline, Author, Topic, Date, Comment Count} for a site like Slashdot but use one like {Headline, Topic, Date} for a traditional blog that doesn't have comments.

Item Deletion: News items can be deleted by either using the [Del] key or using the context menu. Deleted items go to the "Deleted Items" special folder and can be deleted permanently by emptying the folder or restored to the original feed at a later date.

Category Properties: It is now possible to specify certain properties for all feeds within a category such as how often they should be updated or how long posts should be kept before being removed.

del.icio.us Integration: Users who have accounts on the del.icio.us service can upload links to items of interest directly from RSS Bandit.

Skim Mode: Added option to 'Mark All Items As Read on Exiting a Feed'

Scoped Search: Searches can be restricted to specific feeds or categories. So now one can create searches like finding all unread messages that are a week old which contain 'Microsoft' in the title from the Slashdot, InfoWorld or Microsoft-Watch feed.

Search Folder Improvements: Made the following additions to the context menu for search folders; 'New Search Folder', 'Refresh Search', 'Mark All Items As Read' and 'Rename Search Folder'. Also deletion of a search folder now prompts the user to prevent accidental deletion

Subscribing to Web Search Results: Previous versions allowed users to search Web search engines from RSS Bandit, add search engines of their choice as well as specify whether the results were RSS or not. In this version, users can now subscribe to RSS search results after they are returned. By default, MSN Search and Feedster are installed as web search engines with RSS results.

UI Improvements: Tabbed browsers now use a multicolored border reminiscent of Microsoft OneNote.

Identities: One can create multiple personas with associated information (homepage, name, email address, signature, etc) for use when posting comments to weblogs that support the CommentAPI.

Proxy Exclusion List: Users can specify domains which should be accessed directly instead of via the proxy server when making HTTP requests

HTTP Cookie Support: We now support HTTP cookies when requesting feeds.

Delta Encoding in HTTP Support: We support the RFC3229+feed technique when downloading feeds as described at http://bobwyman.pubsub.com/main/2004/09/using_rfc3229_w.html

Better SSL Certificate Error Handling: If there is a problem with the SSL certificate of a site RSS Bandit now provides a dialog with the error information so users can make an informed decision instead of just erroring.

BUG FIXES:

* Fixed issue where a feed with an invalid XML character is encountered it fills the Feed Errors folder with repeated messages whose title begins with "Refresh feed '' failed with error:[], hexadecimal value [] is an invalid character..."

* Comments now sorted from oldest to newest

* Comments now sorted visually differentiated from posts that link to an entry

* Fixed issue where we can't get title from feed that requires username/password in the New Feeds dialog even if they are specified

* Automatic feed detection now ignore feeds a user allready subscribed to

* Fixed issue with ObjectDisposedException sometimes thrown when notification windows pop up

* Fixed issue where if the URL for a feed is changed using the Properties dialog then all old posts are deleted

* Fixed issue where WordPress comment feeds don't show up in RSS Bandit because they use wfw:commentRSS instead of wfw:commentRss

* Clicking on a category node now shows all items from feeds in nested categories as well as child feeds instead of showing items from child feeds only

* Flagged items no longer marked as unread when placed in a flagged item folder

* Fixed issue where updating a search folder's properties leads to duplicate search folders being created

* Fixed issue where errors on loading a cached feed file prevent the feed from being updated from the Web

* Fixed issue where if RSS Bandit is not yet running and you select "Subscribe in default aggregator" within the web browsers context menu or provide url's at the command line, it displays an empty category dropdown.

* URLs containing Cr/Lf no longer cause an error on startup due to a data format XML schema exception

* Locate Feed feature now recognizes Atom autodiscovery links on Blogspot blogs

* Fixed issue where startup position of main window not correct on multi-screen systems

* Fixed issue where we get a feed error when an item in the feed contains an empty slash:comments element

 

I went to see the movie Robots based on the positive reviews of it on Yahoo! Movies both by critics and regular Yahoo! users. The only positive thing I can say about this movie is that the animation was quite good. Everything else about the movie sucked. The songs were annoying, the characters irritating, the jokes were unfunny and the story plodded along in an uninteresting fashion.

Sitting through the movie until the end was an ordeal for myself and the everyone I saw the movie with. Avoid this movie like the plague.

Rating: ** out of *****

 

These are my notes from the Odeo -- Podcasting for Everyone session by Evan Williams.

Evan Williams was the founder of Blogger and Odeo is his new venture. Just as in his post How Odeo Happened Evan likens podcasting to audioblogging and jokingly states that he and Noah Glass invented podcasting with AudioBlogger. Of course, the audience knew he was joking and laughed accordingly. I do wonder though, how many people think that podcasting is simply audioblogging instead of realizing that the true innovation is the time shifting of digital media to the user's player of choice.

The Odeo interface has three buttons across the top; Listen, Sync and Create. Users can choose to listen to a podcast from a directory of podcasts on the site directly from the Web page. They can choose to sync podcasts from the directory down to their iPod using a Web download tool which also creates Odeo specific playlists in iTunes. 

The Odeo directory also contains podcasts that were not created on the site so they can be streamed to users. If third parties would rather not have their podcasts hosted on Odeo they can ask for them to be taken down.  

The Create feature was most interesting. The website allows users to record audio directly on the website without needing any desktop software. This functionality seems to be built with Flash. Users can also save audio or upload MP3s from their hard drive which can then be spliced into their audio recordings. However one cannot mix multiple audio tracks at once (i.e. I can't create an audio post then add in background music later, I can only append new audio).

The revenue model for the site will most likely be by providing hosting and creating services that allow people to charge for access to their podcasts. There was some discussion on hosting music but Evan pointed out that there were already several music sites on the Web andd they didn't want to be yet another one.

Odeo will likely be launching in a few weeks but will be invitation-only at first.