TUAW have found Safari2OPML. Safari users can now Free Their Feeds for grazing and so on. 
XSL Flickr - use XSL to access Flickr's API (via cubicgarden's del.icio.us).
Slavery and superstition 
So, Tony has apologised for Britain's role in slavery. Fantastic.
Quite why, I'm not sure. There's a lot of things Tony Blair has done wrong, but slavery isn't actually one of them, funnily enough.
The idea that people from today should apologise to other people from today for actions performed by people hundreds of years ago is pure superstition. You should be accountable only for your own misdeeds. In fact, it's complete phoniness that a politician can show 'sorrow' for something he's not responsible for, but take no responsibility at all for the things he is responsible for - like the short-sighted mission in Iraq.
The very idea also gives way too much credit to the nation state. The people who were engaged in the slave trade didn't do it for Britain - they did it for money. They were individuals like you and me. Tony Blair can't seek forgiveness on your behalf or mine.
It's the height of arrogance that Tony Blair thinks he can, with a few words, wipe away the evil that was slavery.
The British government should apologise for the slave trade when the German government apologises for the Nazis, the Italians apologise for the Roman Empire and the Israelis apologise for all those barbaric commandments from God in the Old Testament. Yes, all of these things are barbaric. But none of them have anything to do with the current governments or citizens of a country.
Obvious truths for idiots in suits
Hmm. Faint glimmers of realisation are starting to appear. I'm not sure how much longer it will take for the television companies to realise that they are totally and utterly fucked. Sorry, but my laptop screen is higher resolution and far more portable than the box in my living room. If you want to do yourself a favour, find yourself an online distribution partner - Akamai, Limelight etc. - and start offering Xvid downloads of the shows for 99p each with no DRM. Actually, offer two versions - the 99p advertising-supported version or the £1.59 ad-free version.
Offer a show subscription option too - so I can drop the RSS feed in to iTunes. And stop worrying about piracy - it's going to happen whatever you do. Trying to fight online piracy is a little bit like chucking rocks at waves or putting drug dealers in prison. It'll cost you far more in lawyers than you'll lose if you come up with a decent business model.
Think about it. Currently, satellite TV starts at £10 a month and goes up to £40. We were paying that £40 a month to Sky for satellite. And it was shit. Too many adverts, way too much crap. I'm only interested in a small number of programmes - and I'd far rather pay £1 an episode to watch them on my schedule than paying £40 a month to watch them on somebody else's schedule.
Television isn't dead yet. But, for me, it's lying on the ground wounded.
XPath + RDF + SPARQL for distributed mashup development
Here's a crazy idea I've had. XPath is extremely useful for screen scraping, right? You can specify your way to a particular path.
The problem is that this path can then change when the site gets redesigned. So, we could build an API and have a particular person, say, do all the transforms. I could find a way of grabbing as much data as possible from MySpace and then provide a clean XML file for you to consume.
Only problem is that I'd probably end up with a nasty e-mail from someone at Fox Interactive - or my site would get a line in their .htaccess.
No, there's gotta be a better way.
That's what I'm now working on. What I eventually hope to have is a way for an individual to make a database of XPath queries for particular websites, describing those in an RDF file. (I'm trying to get my head around RDF and assorted technology, and building something is the best way for me to figure a technology out.)
Then a mashup developer simply has to send out a query using SPARQL to my RDF file, and in there it will contain the latest function name. That way, if the site gets redesigned, all you have to do is go in to the RDF file, change one line, and all the things built on top of it will automatically get updated.
I haven't quite figured out how it's going to work - I've got to read the specs for the Friend of a Friend specification, since I want to base it on that. RDF is good, but it sure is complicated. I'm also having a bugger of a time getting my head around it all. I'll probably order Shelley Powers' book, "Practical RDF" later. That may help.
