Links for the day

30 August 2006 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ thoughts

More and more ‘links for xx-yy-zzzz‘ posts I see each day in my favorite blogs. I don’t know how you like it but it bugs me. I know where the legs grow from and it’s very convenient way for a publisher to share intersting places he just found, but …

To my mind it’s way too impersonal. When you post a link to del.icio.us you don’t really bother explaining what’s really cool about it. You just drop a sentence or two about the contents and move on. This convenience smells badly, and, in my opinion, quickly leads to the miraculous transformation of good quality into large quantity. You no longer analyze the reasons of why the place looks appealing or grabs your attention; you just pick it up and post like crazy.

The other perspective on this is that it feels like an author doesn’t know what to post and submits daily link list in order to fill the gap between really thoughtful articles. I know, lots of my readers are friends of mine and some of them do post links this way. Look, I’m just describing how I feel about this and it’s not necessarily how everybody does. Don’t take it as offense. It really has nothing personal …

I hate to tell this, but I’m already thinking of a filter to mark all posts starting with ‘links for‘ as read and hide them altogether. It’s not a protest. I just don’t think I have enough time if you don’t have it for better organization and providing own insights. If I needed links, I could subscribe to your del.icio.us account directly or sit and read Digg all day long.

Do I miss some important point? Maybe there’s some special value I don’t see?

Opinions are surely welcome in comments. Sorry if I sounded rude to you.

River of News Concept

17 February 2006 ⋅ 5 min read ⋅ blogbridge thoughts

I was having some periodical brainstorming sessions on River of News Concept throughout the whole day today. By itself, the concept is very simple: you just need a newspaper-like list of articles to scroll through. The question is where do you get these articles or news items?

The first level is definitely a feed. Any feed has several items in it, or it isn’t a healthy feed. Having the feed displayed as the list of complete article bodies rather than only their titles, you get a newspaper-like look of it which makes it easier for you to quickly review what’s on. This is what BlogBridge and some other aggregators do perfectly. And now we are close to some more interesting stuff…

The next step is to combine several feeds in one more wide river with more news drifting by. The most natural way of doing this is to group feeds you like and create “the river” for this group or, speaking in terms of user interfaces, click over the group itself to see every article of every feed in that group. In my opinion, though I’m not a usability expert by any means, this approach is slightly limited. It doesn’t allow me to create several “rivers” with different filters and properties for the given set of feeds. Of course, it will work fine for some time and I’ll be pretty satisfied until I realize that it could be better. For example, I might wish to have a river for today’s news only, the small stream with articles about my favorite tool etc. Having tens of feeds merged together into the same unfiltered stream is the most short path to drowning.

What I’ve learned so far is:

I need a way to join several feeds together into one virtual feed which I could quickly run through and get the most interesting content for me.
I need a way to apply filters to control what’s in this feed.

Pretty simple, yet advanced requirements. At this point, I started to check what our BlogBridge project is missing in order to fulfill my criteria and it comes that not too much. There are several loose ends in Search Feeds (type of Smart Feeds) functionality not allowing me to fully enjoy this whole news drifting stuff:

First and foremost, is that I can’t group all feeds from one guide. Actually I can since today as I implemented it by adding Guide Title property to the Search Feed query builder.

The second is it’s still not convenient to read the news. Any Search Feed should be supplied with the limit value — the number of articles it can have on display. When I have say 100 unread articles all over my subscriptions list and I create a Search Feed with some special criteria (like this: limit=10, status=unread) it shows me top articles only (10 in my case) as required. But when I mark them as read they aren’t being replaced by these in the back list. From one side, it’s correct because if you mark something accidentally and it goes, you won’t be able to get it back easily. On the other hand, I can’t just sit and read — I always need to jump off and get back to the Search Feed again to get another portion of articles.

So, as you can see, we are pretty close to the ideal river of news capable aggregator. There’s just one small step to make. Do you have any ideas on how it could be better to deal with this last problem?

Thinking

7 February 2006 ⋅ 4 min read ⋅ interesting thoughts

I have just been watching an interesting TV program about robots we have today, their intelligence, outlook etc. Quite thought provoking. It may appear disconnected, but what I started to think about after it was how do we think in general.

Everybody knows that we barely use 10% of our mind potential. Basically, it means that either our decision making is slow or the quality of the decisions leaves the room to wish more. Here’s the connection… Did you notice how you think? When we think, well I do it this way at least, we talk to ourselves in our minds. When we read, most of us does the same. It appears that the speed of reading and thinking is artificially limited by the speed of our speech. It gets us to some several interesting conclusions:

A. If we had no speech, we could either think faster or couldn’t think at all.

B. We feel comfortable in our environment because other speakers think at the same speed with us. The one doing it faster is “the genius”, the one slower — you know.

In my opinion, one possible way for improvement could be cutting our mind off the physical abilities. But how the hell we would learn the result of some computation if we didn’t say it loud in the mind? I suspect, that it’s the place where our intuition connects to our thinking.

Intuition is something that is used to foresee the future, and silent thinking, as I call it, to process the facts. Both work silently and emit thoughts and conclusions we could use. Hope the chain of conclusions isn’t broken somewhere.

One other random thought: what if what we call “reaction” is something that’s connected too? What if in the critical situations we manage to make decisions without doubling them in speech what makes our movements faster yet still well-coordinated?

Pretty good pile of random thoughts, hah.

Some Positive Spam

23 January 2006 ⋅ 1 min read ⋅ interesting thoughts

I never payed too much attention to what is in the spam messages I get. Well, until this morning. I briefly scanned the spam from two last days and was surprised with what I discovered. I am winning in at least two lotteries daily, each of which brings me about a million. Now look at it from the funny side.

It’s inconceivable how cool am I that I even don’t bother watching what and when I win, putting it in spam folder all together? I’m just too lazy to grab all this cash. :)

Have a good day… and see you soon!

OPML Oddity and Tricks

5 January 2006 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ development thoughts opml

About two months ago David Winer presented his first version of the Guidelines for validating OPML. Since that time it has been updated two more times, but it is not the point. The point is that the document denotes two possible types of outlines for building directories: link and rss.

In my opinion, there are several problems with it. The major flaw is that RSS link is also a link. Type rss clearly states the type of the resource, but link is very general. Here’s the cut from the document. Read it carefully:

When a link element is expanded in an outliner, if the address ends with “.opml”, the outline expands in place. This is called inclusion. A validator should check that the OPML file being pointed to is accessible, and may wish to validate the pointed-to file as well.

If the address does not end with “.opml” the link is assumed to point to something that can be displayed in a web browser.

(from guidelines)

The main flaw is that lots of OPMLs today use link type when pointing to the RSS feeds. Yes, they could use the rss type, but they don’t. Why? Because it’s easier to always set type link as it works for every type of links well and the validator has no objections. Do you understand what it means for the users and the developers of different aggregators and outliners? Certainly you do. The users immediately become unable to use significant number of OPMLs in their favourite applications and the developers… they are good guys, they always have to follow all these breathtaking twists of a plot.

Today we almost freed ourselves from specific extensions for the feeds. For example, now we have Feedburner service for the feeds which gives us the links, like http://feeds.feedburner.com/noizZze, where we don’t have any specific extensions, like “.xml” or “.rss”. Our blogging web-applications generate feeds on-the-fly. So why I would need extension for my OPML? Just to fit the rules of an OPML directory formation my pet OPML might never be included in? Sorry, but it’s laughable.

Well, where are the tricks? As I was finishing this writing I decided not to include any tricks just because it is already tricky enough.

All this teaches me a good lesson, another lesson about thinking of possible implications. Got to go. The OPML parser is still waiting for my attention…

Holiday Spam Wave

15 December 2005 ⋅ 2 min read ⋅ thoughts

The new wave of spam hit my mailbox with more intense. The spammers appear to become significantly more active approaching the New Year celebration. I’m getting more Rolex watches offers, winning in more lotteries and even losing unbelievable number of passwords from my PayPal account I have never had.