Ten Reasons Why

Hey, I’m going to the MERLOT International Conference 2003 in Vancouver next month.
I’ve never been to Vancouver. :-)

Education

This letter to the editor, The Law and DVDs, in the Washington Post infuriated me when I read it this morning. The letter is a response to Rob Pegoraro’s June 22 Fast Forward column, DVD-Piracy Paranoia Proves Counterproductive.
The letter’s author, Roberth Sugarman, is counsel for the DVD Copy Control Association, the people who control the Content Scramble System (CSS), the DVD copy-protection mechanism.
Sugarman’s letter is full of blatant, outright lies about copyright law. I’m not a regular writer of letters to the editor, but I couldn’t let this one pass. Here’s the letter I wrote and sent today:
Dear Editor:
It disappoints me to see Richard Sugarman misrepresenting the law in his July 3 letter to the editor. ["The Law and DVDs"].

Read more…

Intellectual Property

Flour’s purpose in the universe is to serve as a delivery vehicle for butter and sugar.

Personal

Hmmm. Dave Winer is working on the problem that has plagued the news aggregator of my dreams: synchronizing subscription lists.
I don’t see why this is such a challenging problem. I’m not a programmer, so maybe I don’t get the complexities of it. But I am a fairly technical guy, and if I had the mad programming skills to solve this problem, I’d do it like this:

1. Make the subscription list a severable data file (XML, OPML, WordStar for DOS, whatever).
2. Reference the subscription file’s location by configuring a URI in the aggregator options. If it’s a local file, it’s just a URI pointing to your local file system, but you could also put that data file on any old remote HTTP server, with or without authentication.
1. Hosting the subscription file on an HTTP server gives me the capability to share my subscription list with others, just by pointing them to a URI.
2. Or hell with my own subscription list — maybe I just point my aggregator at someone else’s! If the aggregator allows you to define by URI the location of the subscription file, I could just point to someone else’s publicly available subscription list instead of my own.
3. Even niftier: the aggregator could support pointing at multiple subscription files living on multiple HTTP servers (e.g. just configure multiple URIs). E.g. in addition to being a news aggregator, it becomes a subscription list aggregator.¹ There would probably have to be some pre-processing before aggregation to weed out redundancies. The complexities of that could be a bit more challenging.
   ¹Ooh — and then we could syndicate our subscription lists via RSS! Talk about recursive!
3. Whenever I want to “subscribe” to a new feed, the aggregator updates the remote subscription file on the remote HTTP server.
4. Whenever I want to “aggregate” my feeds, the aggregator pulls down the remote subscription file from the remote HTTP server.

Clear as mud.
UPDATE 3:57pm: Someone should make sure this idea of “online subscription lists” (and the technology to manage and process them) goes into the discussion of the emergingEcho (or Pie) project (whatever it’s called now), if it hasn’t already. For those who haven’t been following the brouhaha, Echo is a project to build a next-generation specification that combines a syndication format and weblog publishing API.

Syndication & Aggregation

Well, yesterday I uninstalled NewsMonster, the RSS aggregator that runs inside of Mozilla. Back to SharpReader.
Great concept, but the execution on NewsMonster left something to be desired. Managing folders/groups of feeds turned out to be a real pain in the ass (no drag and drop, no way to define your own order (just sort by name, number of messages, etc.). It only tracks read/unread status of entire feeds, not individual posts within a feed as SharpReader does. That’s a nearly useless method of tracking.
NewsMonster did whack things to the panes in Mozilla. NewsMonster is its own left pane — why isn’t it just integrated with the existing sidebar in Mozilla? So now you have a NewMonster left pane and a sidebar — there’s goest the screen real estate. When operating NewsMonster in three pane mode, getting rid of the upper pane where the feed headers were displayed was counter-intuitive. Frankly, I never figured out how to do it other than opening a new, empty tab and closing the tab where the header pane lived.
Most important to the decision to jettison it, though, is that NewsMonster was an enormous resource hog. It appeared to double or sometimes even triple the amount or memory Mozilla used and when it was downloading feeds, the entire machine nearly crawled to a halt.
I’m still intrigued by their online profile option, but didn’t find the base functionality worth paying to get the convenience of the subscription list synching.

Syndication & Aggregation

Hormel Foods, makers of Spam (the canned ham, not the unsolicited bulk email) is suing SpamArrest for trademark infringment.

Intellectual Property

For my Canadian and Canadia ex-pat friends who sometimes read this weblog (Darren? Ev? Deb? Celine?) but may not read the Washington Post, I give you this story: Whoa! Canada!

“Just when you had all but forgotten that carbon-based life exists above the 49th parallel, those sly Canadians have redefined their entire nation as Berkeley North.”

Culture