Day: April 14, 2004

Earlier today, Mark Pilgrim took CNET to task for presuming to create YAML (Yet Another Markup Language). That was decidely not the case, but there was cause for confusion.

The culprit? An old feed, not RSS, which was mistakenly listed on the CNET Download.com RSS page and presented as if it were RSS, like the other feeds on the page. (Note: CNET Networks has many, many RSS feeds… start there and you should be able to find them all.)

Mark’s post and Tim Bray’s short note and Dave Winer’s post quickly drew attention from various folks. I asked someone to pull the links to the differently-formatted feeds and post a brief explanation while emailing Tim, Mark, and Dave. Thanks to Tim for acknowledging the correction, publicly and privately, and to Mark for pointing to Tim’s update.

This is the price to be paid for making mistakes in public. I guess I’m glad someone is paying close enough attention to call us on our mistakes. I’m sure we’ll make more! (Tangent: Bush couldn’t think of one mistake he’s made during the press conference last night? Not one?)

I must ask one thing, though… don’t you believe this “small pieces, loosely joined” world would spread even faster if the format(s) were named Hot RSS? (grin)
Mark’s faux badge is one step:
I’d go further, like the FeedBurner team:

Matt Haughey encourages everyone with All Hail Bluetooth, a description of his recent phone upgrade. I have the same 12″ PowerBook, and this desktop Mac, but my cellphone is very 1999 (if that). I’m not in a hurry to switch, but I can see (more of) the appeal.

Jon Udell writes about the lack of margins in electronic documents. His blog post doesn’t add much, which is unusual… he often explores a theme or a tangent more fully there, which I appreciate.

Margins offer room for shared experience and interpretation. We’ve started using a Wiki as our shared project list and organic documentation tool. While it’s not a digital analog to the “scribblings” that Udell calls to mind, the informality — like email — seems to lower the mental barriers to participation. People jump in, with less concern over who “owns” a document. I enjoy the distributed, disjointed conversations that I follow, and sometimes participate in, via blogs and RSS feeds. However, teams need a more organic, less idiosyncratic medium for collaboration. So far, the Wiki feels right… and it gives us a bit of that extra shared space for passing along knowledge, small and large, that prompted Udell’s column.

Rare enough, but got a really good picture of the boy and I from a few weeks ago.

I’ve got both a blog and a Wiki going now at work, so maybe these rules will be useful. Skimming them, I see they are rules for externally-focused blogs and Wikis, but some things still apply inside the intranet.

Think I have it now.

Yup… now I just need to get things live.

I implemented monthly archive links quite easily yesterday, thanks to this Radio macro for monthly archive links. Thanks, Tweezerman.