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Rev Tim asks if we are ready for Thanksgiving. I realize, no, I'm not. I have to do some planning, and some laundry, and some packing for me and my children. Thanks for reminding me, Rev -- I probably would have a less happy Thanksgiving if I did all that stuff at the last minute. Microsoft has launched something called Simple Sharing Extensions, which they say are intended to turn RSS from a unidirectional into a bidirectional information flow. Here's a FAQ. Good? Bad? Exciting? I have no idea. I have to read more. Good news? My net ignorance has stayed level, because I finally understand attention. Ray Ozzie: In order to stay on the same page, each of us has the need for (limited) visibility into aspects of each others’ calendars and schedules. Each of us has a mix of private, shared, and public events and meetings that we’re tracking...As an industry, we have simply not designed our calendaring and directory software and services for this “mesh” model. " True. Let's have a world where this event calendar from boston.com has an RSS feed and populates my calendar Let me subscribe to my husband's calendar, my kid's school calendar. Why does this kind of calendar-sharing require bidirectionality, though? Why isn't it sufficient for me to subscribe to a calendar and refresh if I want to? That's an awful lot of tinkering just to build in an RVSP. One thing about new web applications is that they show us that simple awareness is a lot more important than interaction of the "push this button, get that result" variety. Attention and Santa Claus For years I have wanted a decent wishlist software. I want to be able to add anything that has a page on the net to the wishlist, I want the wishlist to have an RSS feed, I want people who log in to the list to be able to have some simple way of saying "I bought this already, don't buy it." I want to be able to easily make one for my kids with their clothing sizes and ages, and I want visitors to be able to take a "kidfile" with them to Amazon.com and have Amazon only display clothing and toys that are right for their age. Is that too much to ask? Santa, how about dropping some RSS Wishlist magic down the chimney this year? It's not like I'm asking for a five pound box of money, or anything. Well, now that I have something new that I don't understand -- SSE -- I'm glad to say that my net ignorance has remained level, because now I understand what "attention" is. I listened to this ten minute podcast on OPML and attention by Alex Barnett, and I get it. Moreover, it might be just the thing to grant my Christmas wish. So what is Attention? Attention is a way of storing data about your habits so that applications and websites you use get smarter. An example Alex gave is that if I had my attention.opml file from my RSS reader, I could load it at Amazon, and Amazon could recommend books to me based on what feeds and blog posts I spent the most time with. More importantly, this data is both mine -- it's not locked up in somebody else's web service -- and it's portable; I can move the OPML file around to different sites and apps and get new and different things from it. Attention.opml might be a prybar to pry my Amazon wishlist loose from Amazon. Statistics and reporting and "what did I do last time" are very valuable and often neglected features. The most important button on a browser? The BACK button. Reporting and history are often an afterthought, but it's that history that new and more powerful apps are built on. Mike Arrington: "New companies will be built on the back of SSE." Now that I can get OPML out of search engines, what would happen if I could load OPML into search engines? Could such a search engine give me a huge constellation of feeds related to the ones I have for my Watertown, MA news site? Syndicating ping-state with OPML. Damn, net ignorance +1. (Actually that's good, not learning anything is stagnation. Boring!) Jim Moore: "You can explore OPML with a River-of-News style aggregator with one click." |
Last modified: Monday, November 21, 2005 at 7:00 PM.
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