Category Archives: BloggerCon

Adam on SJMN piece about a dying Internet

BloggerCon

Adam writes:.

Reading this story about the possibility of the internet as we know it (open end-end networks) dying, made me think of an essay I wrote 2 years ago: WiFi Peering. Would it be possible to use this technology to route around government imposed (and/or sanctioned) gateways like last-mile broadband providers? [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

Adam, I agree that you are on to something. WiFi switching capability is right around the corner, and that would allow serious performance boosts in meshed networks. However, an important component to remember is that the FCC designated that frequency band for unlicensed experimental communications, so at some point, they will step back in and regulate it.

Radio reads Atom feeds

BloggerCon, Radio

So I hacked Radio to accept an Atom 0.3 feed. Or did I? Well, I subscribed to the feed using Radio's standard mechanism, it's internal webpage. It reported an error with channel title, but a page refresh showed it in my list of subscriptions.

To be sure, I opened aggregatorData.root and deleted Mark Pilgrim's conventional feed. Right above it in the table was the atom-based URL. I'll leave it there and see how Radio parses it.

By the way, his Atom feed validates at Userland's RSS validator. [fingers crossed–maybe the aggregator won't know the difference.]

update: It knew the difference. So, I googled for some help and found a page about Radio's driver architecture that had some good information. Great, no problem. I followed the instructions there and was rewarded with disappointment: no compile script. No problem–more googling found this post that Dave wrote about his creation of a format reader for an Echo feed. Fine, Dave, but why didn't you follow your own instructions? Your feed format compiler is in the system space reserved for Userland. The original aggregator driver architecture post says it's in the user space. What gives?

Also, Mark tried it and it worked, but the format changed. I don't have the experience to catch up. Anyone else want a go?

This just points out how “pointless” the whole feed format this is. It's like Word vs. Word Perfect. Who cares?

Brain dump on discovery infrastructure for personal content

BloggerCon, Idea, Radio

Holy Sh*t!

This means that we need a subscription signalling infrastructure for the three fundamental methods of communication:

  • One to one.
  • One to many.
  • Many to one.

Content delivery uses:

One to one is email. One to many is RSS. Many to one BitTorrent.

So now we need a global infrastructure like we have for DNS, right? Signaling in a standard format what's out there for me, where it is, and how to get it. My aggregator knows how to get it because the infrastructure tells it where it is.

So why the expletive? Well, we've got all of the delivery methods in place, so let's stop trying to reinvent them and instead reinvent the way we dicover our own content. Home servers are coming closer to a reality, so we can store the content we have for others locally. We can backup content for us locally or leave it on the place where it came from, getting it when we want to, not when we have to.

(ever been so excited about an idea that you can't type fast enough?)

TiVo does this to some extent.

Think TiVo meets email meets BitTorrent meets iTunes Music Store meets personal publishing. That's the client.

Think DNS as the infrastructure. I need “yahoo.com”, where is it? My local DNS server sends me to the root and that sends me to Yahoo!'s DNS server. It returns the IP for the web/ftp/email/IM server. DNS is our content infrastructure now, we're just not using it for that now.

Enter your DNS servers in a Network dialog box to make your Internet access make sense. No more IPs for you! Just those simple to remember names. So now, open your aggregator and enter the content directory servers. Oops! Can't do that!

Apple/next used to do this with NetInfo, but for local resources. Now they are slowly redoing it with Rendesvouz.

Wow… brain empty for now. Man, this is exciting…

My comment on Dave's Rant

BloggerCon, Radio

I'm reposting this here from comments on this post:

All:

Great comments so far. Very interesting discussion. Let's explore some other real-life situations where things needed to change but the situation didn't.

Stop signals:

Two roads cross creating an intersection. There is a shared goal for all intersection users: allow free flow of traffic but minimize the potential for accidents. First, stop signals were whistles, but later semaphores and then finally colored lights. What hasn't changed? Why, it's the color of the lights, folks. Red means stop, weather it's on a static sign or a colored light. The mechanism has changed over the last 100 years, but the concept is the same.

Most importantly, the shared goal of traffic control hasn't changed. The world of RSS/Atom/content-syndication does not have a shared goal. Therefore, there cannot be a universally accepted method of “signalling” a way to subscribe to a content feed.

Read my traffic signalling source site: Dave's Traffic Signal Page

The last paragraph contains a lesson for us all: “However, these early electric traffic signals provided little flexibility in traffic coordination as compared to the observations of a police officer. This led to the development of traffic signal coordination. The first coordination development was the simultaneous traffic signal system which was installed in Houston, Texas in 1922. In this system, all the traffic signals on the main roadway would change to green at the same time. After that, the next coordination development was the alternate traffic signal system which was installed in the District of Columbia in 1926. The alternate system is the type of coordination system that is used today.”

Mulitple systems that do the same thing don't offer the user the flexibility to coordinate traffic (subscribed content). We need a coordinated development with a shared goal. Not a goal that everyone likes, a shared goal. Focus on the shared goal and the traffic lights will turn green.

Comments are golden

BloggerCon, Radio

There's a debate in comments about a Dave Winer 'rant' on a contest to rename RSS. This nugget was in the comments:

Saying that the only way to get content is to have aggregators pulling it is missing a whole other way of doing it, that's proven itself as scalable and resilient over the years: NNTP

I'm not talking about using NNTP directly but taking ideas from it. Having a network of servers that talk to each other, where items propagate between servers, and where users talk to a single server that's close to them instead of reaching all over the world to poll, makes a lot more sense.

Rather than having a million aggregators hitting 20 or 30 sites an hour each, those million aggregators would talk to server, and the servers would talk to each other, so that your aggregator client would simply talk to an “RSS Server” near you to pick up all the things you subscribed to.

No polling involved – at least, not polling of the sites themselves.

If email was implemented the way RSS is implemented, then my mail client would be polling all my friends every half hour to see if they've sent me an email. Nobody would implement email that way – but that's what RSS is.

SMTP moves mail from the author to a server close to the user, in the background, maybe involving multiple servers in between. Long term, I think this is going to have to happen with RSS as well.
Steve Tibbett [apple] 12/9/03; 5:07:54 PM

My favorite part is the sentence about email working like RSS. Classic.

Dave's social experiment

BloggerCon

Dave writes a note about leaving the barn door open on scripting.com on purpose. When Phil says it's “weird” having a site on Scripting News, Dave asks “why?” I'll try to answer from my perspective.

Dave, I've always categorized scripting.com as a personal site of yours, not a general news and information site. To have a site on the scripting.com domain would be akin to you saying “come and be a Scripting fellow” much like Harvard has done with you. While some have sought your respect, you always require it to be earned and not given. To be “given” a scripting.com site seems oddly out of Dave-character.

To this end, I propose that you create a Scripting fellowship. Gin up an essay form for submissions and cull the group for the best submissions. Pick 5-ish “fellows” and allow them to create a Manila site off scripting.com, but with a mandate that the content explores a central theme: RSS, scripting, user/Internet interaction, whatever the case may be.

I'd be thrilled to read it and even more so to apply.

Update: Dave linked to this post–thanks! I'd like to suggest that we give Dave some ideas, so I started this discussion group.

scripting.com/defaultx.html

BloggerCon, Radio

What a difference four years makes:

http://www.scripting.com/defaultx.html

Read the link and come back….

Check out the directory listing at the top of the page. Smile at Dave's old picture. Remember where we came from and read some of the posts. Not much has changed in concept (convince people to use new technology in new ways) but the adoption rate is *much* larger.

Here's a real gem from that page:

http://discuss.userland.com/msgReader$8047

BloggerCon, Radio

Radio's aggregator has made me the happiest the most often, but it's doing something I can't control: deleting subscriptions. There's a pref setting “Number of errors before automatic unsubscribe” and you can put any number in there you want. Somehow, though, I've lost two subscriptions in the last three days.

I find this frustrating, but according to Steven Covey, “urgent but not important”. The event log is informative on some things, but not this. My only recourse is to go back to a page published last week and compare the subscription list (generated by mySubscriptions.opml at the time) to the one I currently have.

I wonder what new management will do for Userland? More money? More resources? Even better software?