So I wonder. I’m on some mailing lists which get a fair amount of noise mixed in with the signal. But it’s hard to tell whether a given piece of mail is gonna be signal or noise before I open it. You can’t tell by person — most people say something intelligent at least some of the time. Besides, I really hate categorically killfileing anyone. I wonder if you couldn’t use spamprobe as an effective mailing list filter? ...
Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church has taken a stand against certain aspects of text messaging. They’re OK with prayer exercises over SMS (original), but you can’t confess your sins over cell phone. Which, I gotta say, seems reasonable.
RSS aggregators are going in the wrong direction. Here’s the problem. A good number of my friends use LiveJournal, as do I, mostly to read their journals at this point. One of the coolest things about LJ is the friends list concept, which allows you to interleave the journals of everyone you’ve marked as a friend. Good stuff. Certainly you can do that with the various desktop RSS aggregators. ...
I know everybody says this, but man, there are a metric boatload of pretty badly formed RSS feeds out there. I have most of an application written that trawls a blogrolling.com blogroll for RSS feeds and generates a “friends” page from whatever it finds. I even respect “Last-Modified” headers. Unfortunately, everyone kicks out bad RSS. Some people also have pretty flaky RSS autodiscovery bumpf — Atrios, for example, winds up pointing my l’il robot to an RSS feed containing the last few comments on his blog. Weird. I could work around that, though, although it would kind of kill the glorious automation purity I’ve got now. ...
Magpie RSS is a PHP RSS parser. Tagged for later reference.
Last night on American Idol, after each contestant sung, they did the usual “call this number to vote for this singer” bit. But this season, they’ve added another fillip: “Or text this number!” Just like that, no explanation of what the word means. Fox knows its target audience, I guess. Or they’re just trying to look hipper.
Mr. Sterling — no, it’s OK! This is a technology post, not a review. Read on. Mr. Sterling, which is continuing to be mediocre, had an interesting little moment last night. Senator Sterling was sitting in a committee meeting tilting at a windmill, while a press conference raged outside. One of his aides was at the press conference, keeping Sterling updated via BlackBerry. No explanation of what was going on, just a flash of one aide typing on a BlackBerry and the aide with Sterling getting the message. You know a technology’s becoming prevalent when it shows up in a TV show without explanation.
[AltaVista](“https://www.altavista.com/ “), my home for several years, has been bought by [Overture](http://web.archive.org/web/20081011122206/http://web.archive.org/web/20081011122206/http://www.overture.com/. (original).) (original). I think congratulations are in order. The price was $60 million in cash, plus $80 million in stock. How times have changed; AltaVista paid $163 million for Raging Bull, a few years back, and of course CMGI paid $2.9 billion for AltaVista back in the day. Still, I hope that the employees will get a small liquidity event (damn, that sounds coy these days). ...
CafePress has pre-announced (original) their CD and book print on demand services. They’re hoping to get ‘em online in March. Man, that’s like less than a month away. The prelim specs (original) for books are pretty decent. They’re gonna be taking PDF files. They’ll probably support a range of sizes for both perfect bound and saddle stitched. Hopefully they’ll support standard book rack paperback sizes. ...
Google just bought Pyra. Or, to put it in clearer terms, Google just bought Blogger. I, um, yeah. The bad speculation is that Blogger posts will get indexed in more or less real time. I suspect that won’t happen, because there are certain technological barriers in the way, but it might. It seems more than likely that Blogger will at least be used for page discovery. ...