Mobile message boards

Started up a message board over at MobileTracker. If you register, I’ll take you out next time you’re in Tampa :). But seriously, it looks way better to have a ton of posts/members. Help a brother out.

Update: OK, I know a lot of you read this and didn’t sign up. Punks.

Moving to TypePad

“Update your linkbars, I’m moving to TypePad! Sorry Winer, your product just sucks too much.” – Tom Bridge

Welcome to TypePad.

E-mail? The French beg to differ

France has banned the word “e-mail” from the lexicon. I’m starting to think we should just cut them off. Any traffic from France gets forwarded to /dev/null. More seriously, what’s with their attitude?

RSS gets shuffled

So the big news of the day is that control of RSS 2.0 got moved to Harvard. For the small number of people that care, here’s my take:

• Dave Winer and his old company controlled RSS 2.0 prior to today
• Dave Winer and his new company (1) control (2) RSS 2.0 today
• Can we all just agree on something? Screw 8 formats. Give me something that I can publish in and can be understood by everyone.

Notes:

1) Harvard is a school, but that’s just another name for a company (except they waste more money).

2) OK, so he doesn’t control it all. He started a board. I would have liked to see a little more democratic action though…

Feedster won’t be bought [updated]

**I updated the story as it was written late late last night and didn’t make sense in some parts. You should re-read.**

First off, I don’t have anything against Feedster. Scott‘s a great guy. But I want to dispell some talk that Feedster will be bought.

Dave seems to think Google or Yahoo will snap Feedster up. “Isn’t it obvious that either Google or Yahoo will buy Feedster so their search engine can understand RSS.”

Ok. Let’s think this through. Why would corporations with multi-billion dollar market caps need to buy a little PHP code to know how to parse standard XML? None of the code could be used in a production environment. Feedster is already slow and it’s only getting a handful of searches a day.

With the number of PhD’s they have floating around the Googleplex, an enterprise level parser could be written in days. Google already knows how to search, and they can scale like no one’s business.
Read more

CNN tackles that funny orange thing

“You might have seen odd little orange “XML” rectangles on some sites. The URL when you click on the rectangle is the address of the news feed.” – CNN

Oh and later on they mutter “webblog” (seriously, with 2 b’s). At least they plug NetNewsWire.

Update: I should mention that there is not even a single RSS feed located over at CNN.com. To get one you have to go to the screen scraping site News Is Free (very handy site by the way).

MacMinute pulls a “Drudge”

The folks over at MacMinute have duped Matt Drudge‘s famous “developing…” line. I’m guilty of the same thing many many times, but I love to tease the MM boys. Here’s a screen shot because I know it won’t last (that’s the whole idea behind developing).

Oh, and like you care, but the story is on Apple launching a video store a la the iTunes Music Store. W00t.

Update: They took it off. Heh. That’s why I screen cap things :).

Support ticket phenomenon

I’ve submitted 3 support tickets in the TypePad system. Only two are of interest (one was an accident and I marked it as closed soon after I opened it). The two in question are #1009 and #2009. Yes. I skipped exactly 1,000 posts between questions. What are the odds? Follow my pseudo-statistical calculations below to find out.

1. 1) Odds of first ticket being number 1,009 is 1/1,009*
2. 2) Odds of first ticket being number 2,009 is 1/1,000
3. 3) Together this means the odds are 1,009*1,000 or simply 1,009,000

Too bad I can’t say “one in a million”… Sounds a lot cooler than “one in one million and nine thousand”

* I realize this is a stretch… The odds are completely determined by time. I couldn’t really have supprt ticket 1. To get the true odds I’d have to find out how many tickets were in the queue when I started becoming a tester. This is just for fun purposes. You math types that try to ruin my fun have pathetic sad lives. Go away.

Clever spam (still evil)

This is one of the best spams I have gotten in a while…

To: jon XX macmerc.com
From: Eng.Andre B. [admidir@hotmail.com]
Subject: question

Hi,

This is Andre Botelho. I'm surfing right now at "AOL Netfind", and I saw your contact at this web site: http://iheartmena.typepad.com/weblog/2003/07/ rss_anonymous_m.html I want to tell you that you're doing a great job!

I know my customers would be well-suited prospects and vice-versa. What should I do
if I want to send a few of them your way?

Looking forward to your reply. Reply to my personal email address: andrebotelho@aweber.com

Best Regards,

Andre

Anyone else gotten one of these? Clever to use my own page/post to trick me into replying.

RSS Anonymous meeting tuesday

I subscribe to a lot of feeds. So many that I almost consider NetNewsWire a friend. You say “Ya buddy, we all have a lot of subs in NNW. You’re not special.” Well you’re probably right…. but mine are organized like only a sick freak could manage (see screen shot).

Yes, that is an incubator. What’s it for? Any new feeds I add get stuck in there for a few weeks just to make sure they are really as good as I thought. I wouldn’t want to put something half-assed in the mix of pure goodness now would I?

I’ve seen a lot of people who don’t even use folders to manage their subs. If you’re in NetNewsWire, just go up Subscription>New Group. Very handy. Also, you may note I have a “Live Journal” folder. Since I am not a member (thus do not have a Friends page) but want to read a few journals I stash them all in there. With any LJ user, just tack a /rss to the end and you’ll get a feed:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/admin/rss