Dark Matter - we can help. The reason that OPML doesn't display in the browser is because it needs to be rendered. It is possible to do this with XSL, but it's quite complex. It's eaiser to use a display engine like the OPML Editor's directory rendering engine (opmlDirectory.root) or Grazr. 
Leander Kahney at Cult of Mac: "Part of the magic of this discovery was the serendipity. If it had been a "feature" -- a behavior purposely brought to my attention by Apple -- I would have shrugged and said, "so what?" But because I discovered it by accident, it struck me as artisan touch; a craftsman's attention to detail."
The new Skype for OS X really is very nicely designed and quite minimal. More people need to write OS X apps like this. I also like the design for Gizmo.
A wikified list of things you can do with RSS.
Lifehacker linked to a $30 air conditioner. I'm building a simple, not-too-optimised version using a frozen lemonade bottle and a desk fan.
I love this ad.
Kazim went to church recently.
The governor of Arkansas thinks that people are "spiritually disconnected".
Oh my, the "Pledge Protection Act of 2005" looks scary. Take note, good American citizens.
Guy Kawasaki's list of mummybloggers keeps reappearing in my aggregator. Make an OPML file, for chrissakes and link to it, and stop pestering me with updates. I must have seen this post fifteen damn times in the last week or so.
Mack Collier: "Ever seen a woman spend all day at a shopping mall and come home empty-handed, and completely satisfied with how she spent her day?" I've seen a man doing the same thing. It's mostly because they want to get something imprecise (something to read, listen to, watch etc.) and found nothing in the shops because the shops don't service the long tail. You walk out happy because you're not giving them money. A penny saved is a penny earned, right?
Scoble linked to this the other day - One in the Hand is a video podcast about using the Palm platform - Treos specifically. I'm a T|X guy, and this looks very handy (pun intended in retrospect).
You might want to renew your passport now. There's a financial incentive to do so, plus a liberty incentive too.
Marshall Kirkpatrick (at TechCrunch): "Podcasts are fun to listen to, but they'd be even cooler if you could listen live and IM your feedback to the host in real time". And thus podcasting eats itself and becomes meaningless... we had "netcasting", "webcasting" and "Shoutcasting" to refer to live broadcast. Podcasting is time-shifted almost by definition.
Just got an odd Scripting News oddity in Bloglines. 23 unread entries, all of which have posted dates of April 29-30 2003. The RSS is messed up.
I'm not the only one who's mocked Steve Gillmor using cartoons. Good stuff, Oliver. 
Another old link that I've had sitting in my aggregator - iLounge reviews the iPod Nike kit.
Techdirt has a post about the ridiculousness of online gambling.
I'm back on the lovely Mac! Book! Pro! The problems I seemed to be having are now gone away. And I can finally get my productivity back - and work down away from my desk in rooms where it's a little cooler and less humid.
Textual incompetence 
Emily Bell doesn't get it. When we talk about online communication, we aren't talking about something that is radically new. McLuhan was only partially right - a Hegelian McLuhanism is actually a more healthy and true way of looking at what's going on. If you believe that "80% of communication is non-verbal", then you need to state that the "strange and partial picture of humanity" built up by online communication is the same as the picture one would get if one communicated only through written text.
Humanity hasn't fallen apart as a result of the written word - Shakespeare didn't have to worry about how "the tone of a conversation is harder to modulate in text" - he worked out how to do it and then did it! When we moan about how online communication is subject to this difficulty in modulation, we are talking about written language completely.
If online communication goes awry, it means one of two things: the people reading it can't read what has been written or the people writing it can't write very well. This is as true of poetry, drama, novels, essays, lectures and newspaper articles as it is of e-mails, newsgroup postings, blog posts and comments and messages on online dating sites.
I've written about this before, and it looks to me as if it's a case of the education system - which excels at mediocrity - coming back to haunt us.
I do like ahateo's comment over at CiF (why is there no comment permalinks at CiF?):
Sadly, the postings above illustrate a grim truth: that most online comments added by readers are worthless at best, offensive at worst. The Guardian's introduction of CiF, encouraging pointless comments on news stories; its new slogan, 'What do you think?'; and the simultaneous conversion of BBC news programmes to the religion of interactivity ('Please text us...') are symptoms of a misguided trend.
This "text us" thing is so strange. If you are looking for quality contributions to the debate on any subject of importance, you can't get it across too easily via text message. The BBC has a programme about religion called "The Heaven and Earth Show" - and they debated creationism on there a while back. I grabbed my laptop and fired off an email to the studio explaining various issues. I've read almost a whole shelf of books on the subject and listened to probably 48 hours worth of audio on the topic, and spoken with many, many experts - I know enough to be writing my dissertation on the topic. I'm not an expert, but I'm fairly close. Modesty aside, my contribution was short, pithy and supported by a large amount of evidence.
What did the producers do? Go to Karen from Crawley who had some general middle-of-the-road opinion that she'd texted in. WTF? I hope I'm not being egotistical - but who gives a fuck? I just sent an email that explained in three paragraphs the logical and metaphysical underpinnings of the argument, but in this wacky world of "user-generated content", my valuable content gets ignored in the face of a dull text about someone's fairly dull opinion.
How not to do journalism in the new world: consider all contributions equal and think that "user-generated content" will solve all problems. For the Internet, the blogosphere and so on to work, people need to speak clearly and with logic and reason.
