 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
David Wilkinson: "I have been in dire straights for the last few days. I have been without my River of News. :-( Dave Winer, you have spoiled me." David's up and running again now. Cool. Gareth Stack: I think I just got it. For the past few weeks I’ve been puzzling over what the OPML, RSS, AJAX alphabet soup will ultimately end up tasting like. I've intuited for a long time that the whole gestalt is far more significant than most programmers or technology commentators realise; and of far more ultimate utility than as a succinct method of information categorisation. I now realise, OPML (or an OPML like outliner standard in XML) underlies the future of both the browser and the web. Megite Technology News has 300+ hits on del.icio.us. Memeorandum isn't alone anymore. Del.icio.us reading lists generator Fluxam: "RSSextender is a .NET 2.0 proxy system that grabs and scrapes RSS feeds as local OPML and XML, with the point being that you can see more of the story than you customarily get in a few-word synopsis." Tom Morris responds to an article about Internet plagiarism by students and bloggers and says, "His basic thesis is that parents have 'institutionalised' plagiarism and cheating. It's a nice idea but I'm unconvinced." I'm pretty unconvinced too. I've read all the same stories the author of the essay has about hypercompetitive parents doing everything they can to get their kids into schools, including cheating and near cheating on exams, but if I had done that, my parents would have killed me, and if my kids grew up to do that sort of thing they would be in very, very hot water with me. As we move towards a winner take all society, parents get more desperate about competing for the kinds of schools and programs they believe will get their children a lifetime of secure employment. But cheating only gets a person so far: at some point, you've gotta deliver the goods. (Pause to consider this in the light of the current president, experience moment of doubt). I do see examples of this kind of parenting, though -- when I was at my town's annual fair, two women were talking in front of my booth, and I overheard one of them talking about how their son got suspended from a sports team because he had been caught drinking. "They can't prove that, though, and I'm not going to let them ruin his senior year," she said. I was really appalled. |
Last modified: Friday, October 31, 2008 at 9:25 PM.
Tech resources |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
