Category: BlogStreet

Paul DiPerna has an interview with Howard Rheingold:

What is happening now has to do with not only the expanded capabilities of individuals, but the new forms of collective action that people will inevitably concoct with the technological platforms and the media that are built on those platforms. The action is on multiple levels simultaneously, just as it is in biology. Now, it’s the individual technology, the technical network, the application layer, the psychological, social, economic layers. In biology, it was the cellular, organ, organism, ecosystem layering.

Jeremy Zawodny writes:

You can get RSS output from lots of non-news and non-blog stuff. Everything from classifieds on eBay and craigslist to Bugzilla, Wikis, and so on.

The problem has been a lack of good tools for pulling it all together. In the Unix world, we often connect sources of data to filters and utilities using pipes. A pipe is a way of constructing ad-hoc workflows composed of any number of inputs, filters, and manipulation tools. And the beauty of the whole system is that they all use a very simple input and output method, so there’s a nearly infinite set of ways you can combine and recombine them.
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Yahoo Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

Tim O’Reilly adds:

Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as “an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator” that allows you to “create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.” While it’s still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone.

Michael Parekh writes:

It’s not going to be long before mainstream cable and media offer subscription streams for every imaginable type of video content, coming into your DVR and/or home server.

And it’s not just subscription services to PC or even TVs anymore. Let’s not forget SMS subscriptions on your cell phones (or mobiles as they’re known overseas).

It’s time we re-thought feeds readers of all types for mainstream folks, and really reduce the stress in their online lives.

Danny Sullivan has a Q&A with Gabe Rivera, Creator of Techmeme, a site I check daily.

Q. Is Techmeme an echo chamber, just showing blogs commenting about blogs commenting about blogs? Does Techmeme feed into that echo chamber? Or how do you break apart the conversations on a particular topic into sub-conversations or topics?

Clearly Techmeme creates superficial incentives for “echo chamber” participation, yet I don’t see clear evidence that this makes things noticeably worse. I still like to trot out the example of the day my site launched. eBay’s acquisition of Skype became one of those huge story clusters, and this was hours before Techmeme [then tech.memeorandum] was publicly launched, i.e. before anyone believed they could get on the site by linking to stories.

EirePreneur writes: “My predictions for 2007 were dominated by Google Reader because it’s one of the products best placed to dominate the Read/Write web. The addition of support for tagging and link blogging were the warning shots but the coming months will see Reader evolve into a fully fledged Reader/Writer (let’s call it ReWriter). Google ReWriter is the first product that will tie the major pieces of the Read/Write web together – RSS/ATOM (feeds), OPML, Social-Bookmarking/Tagging (folksonomies), Attention and Microformats.”

Robin Good has compiled a list. “RSS tools and services play an increasingly important role in the effort to effectively aggregate, syndicate, market and distribute online content.”

Howard Rheingold: “The tools for cultural production and distribution are in the pockets of 14 year olds. This does not guarantee that they will do the hard work of democratic self-governance: the tools that enable the free circulation of information and communication of opinion are necessary but not sufficient for the formation of public opinion. Ask yourself this question: Which kind of population seems more likely to become actively engaged in civic affairs a population of passive consumers, sitting slackjawed in their darkened rooms, soaking in mass-manufactured culture that is broadcast by a few to an audience of many, or a world of creators who might be misinformed or ill-intentioned, but in any case are actively engaged in producing as well as consuming cultural products? Recent polls indicate that a majority of today’s youth the “digital natives” for whom laptops and wireless Internet connections are part of the environment, like electricity and running water have created as well as consumed online content. I think this bodes well for the possibility that they will take the repair of the world into their own hands, instead of turning away from civic issues, or turning to nihilistic destruction.”

From Duncan Riley. Among them: “Its sad to note that there has been no great innovation in the blogosphere since the successful uptake of WordPress some 2-3 years ago. Of course, WordPress success itself is a quirk of history, being in the right place at the right time, particularly as SixApart imposed fees on its user base. But where in the past, every year bought great innovation, from GreyMatter to MovableType to WordPress, and others in between, the last few years have been a barren wasteland of conformity and similarity. Whether 2007 will provide a great new innovation of blogging is, I suppose, best left to conjecture, but word that AOL may release Blogsmith in one form or another offers some hope. Surely, amongst the masses of VC funding and startups a company exists that will revolutionise blogging for us all once again.”

[via Atanu] The Bayesian Heresy has a compilation of the favourite economics blogs of 2006.

HipMojo writes:

First, it should be noted that video consumption amongst users will become even more commonplace. Smart media companies like News Corp. are putting a lot of their good stuff online, even those who do not put it all out there and experimenting, like Walt Disneys ABC.
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But, what I see becoming more and more mainstream is something that has been brewing louder and louder this year. People will begin to increasingly get their virtual newspapers (proverbially speaking) delivered to them; via RSS (Real Simple Syndication) and other means, be it in their inbox, on their blogs or social network profiles (see how everything gels?).