Powerpoint has an auto-content
feature for creating rich templates of common presentations. The name started out as an inside joke, but it grew into the application’s most popular feature.
RSS feeds are machine-readable. Many provide full posts, and the rest provide permalinks to scrape-able HTML pages. Blogdex, Daypop, Popdex, Technorati, and Google News all either provide RSS feeds or are scraped into RSS by existing tools. Tools exist to automatically find new sites based on an existing list. Tools exist to excerpt quotes from referring pages, or in fact from any page. Posting can be automated with the weblog API of your choice. Trackback can auto-discover and auto-ping linked sites.
Why does this cite-link-quote (hit-and-run
) style of weblogging need to be a manual process at all? Why can’t I just click an auto-content
button and have my software automatically generate a list of, say, a dozen interesting links and quotes culled from my aggregator subscriptions, neighboring
sites, sites discussing the hot topics of the day, and mainstream articles reporting on a small hard-coded list of additional topics?
So I’m thinking that I might prematurely release some code before the week is out, so anyone who’s interested can point and laugh at my PersonalWebProxy exploits – this time in Java.
The author of the Economist essay goes on to argue that since digital technologies have greatly reduced the difficulty of creating and distributing digital works, “most creators do not need incentives that stretch across generations.” Perhaps the 14-year term of the original 18th-century British and American copyright laws, renewable once, might be a reasonable compromise.
Maybe someday the Superbowl will be hours of high-quality commercials interspersed with some highlights from the football game.
A NOTE ON LINUX DEVICES said that OzXChip has released a modchip for the Xbox console which is pre-installed with a Cromwell Linux BIOS.
It is a key tool for the open-source development community, and has been used in large-scale developments such as the Mozilla browser, the Python programming language, some versions of Linux such as ARM Linux, the freeDOS operating system and a Palm OS emulator.
Why would Phoenix — sorry, Surfzilla — want to start down the road of stupid prefs?
Spiny Software, developers of applications for Apple Mac OS X, is proud to announce the release of their freeware comic-strip viewer Comictastic 1.1.3.
Red Hat, in Raleigh, N.C., didn’t comment for this story before it went to press. However, Debian.org, which maintains the Debian GNU/ Linux operating system, is looking at including Eclipse in its tool set, said a representative of the Debian Project at LinuxWorld, who asked not to be named.
It is a good overview of the different APIs available and their strengths and weaknesses..
David Hyatt’s recent blog entry on RSS aggregators, NetNewsWire, and Safari touched off an interesting little debate that I’d like to take further and perhaps broaden.
In order to guarantee the seamless conversion and interaction of heterogeneous systems, common standards are necessary, e.g., XML. But these standards should also be considered with caution as they are a “living thing” that evolves with use. The panel also recommended starting with the existing recommendations of the W3C but always keeping in mind their evolving nature.
Earthlink had an old email address for me (something I only found out this morning), and so I never received confirmation of that upgrade other than the fact that my monthly bill increased.
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© 2001–present Mark Pilgrim