Archives for March 2004

I haven’t yet commented

March 24, 2004 by Michael Boyle

I haven’t yet commented

on the hoo-haw that former terrorism czar Richard Clarke has caused with the publication of his book and the interview with him that was broadcast on 60 Minutes on Sunday. I saw the interview, and the lame responses from the White House, and I must say that I’m pretty surprised – and encouraged – that Clarke’s point of view is seeing the light of day. And he’s obviously hitting a target – the attacks on him from the White House since Sunday have been coming fast and furious, though they have been equally ineffectual, petty, and contradictory.

Anyhow – today in Salon there is an interview with Clarke in which he responds to the attacks.

More info

March 23, 2004 by Michael Boyle

More info

about TypeKey was published last night in the form of a FAQ that covers most of the stuff people have been going crazy about. Hopefully everyone will calm down now and see how this develops.

Interesting:

March 20, 2004 by Michael Boyle

Interesting:

TypeKey, from Six Apart, makers of Movable Type and TypePad. I’ve been starting to think that Flickr might have something to offer in this area as well. My personal view is that they should work together and figure out how to federate this in some way. It would go a long way to calming fears that will arise from those who don’t want to rely on a single, central server from a single company.

So with all this talk of Iraq,

March 18, 2004 by Michael Boyle

So with all this talk of Iraq,

what’s going on in Afghanistan? Christina Lamb of the New Statesman gives us a reality check: The return of the Taliban. “Liberated women? The chief justice wants to ban women from driving. That’s not the only way in which the reality in Afghanistan falls short of US claims.”

Syndication and me.

March 18, 2004 by Michael Boyle

Syndication and me.

I’ve been following all the hoo-haw about RSS and Atom and such for a long time now. I have used NetNewsWire at home and Bloglines (here’s my list there: mikel’s blogs). I love that more and more services are offering syndicated content in whatever format. But I also know this: I hate reading weblogs through their feeds.

For me, the words on a website aren’t really distinct from the overall effort that has been put into the site – the design, the additional content, the links, the stupid little buttons – I love all of that stuff. Extracting the words from that is, to me, to denude the weblog owner’s work far too much, it is to remove more context than I like. I have found that I much prefer a service like Blo.gs or something that lets me know when my favourite sites have been updated so I can go and read them myself, and in the format that the writer intended.

I don’t mind if you, dear reader, prefers to read this in either RSS or Atom formats (I provide both). But me? I prefer to get the full effort a person has made, not the minimalist version that RSS provides.