Author: John Roberts

I’m excited about how RSS has changed my reading habits, but the growing fervor hasn’t yet convinced me there is a new business opportunity here. Maybe if you’re an independent software developer (think Ranchero.com or Bradsoft.com), and you can move faster than Microsoft’s Outlook team. But… really something large here? We’ll see.

I’m wondering whether I’m ready for my newsreader to be more than a reader? Seeing as I’m still using NetNewsWire Lite instead of the real thing, maybe not. Also, I like thinking/working in my email client, but I’m happy to think of email and RSS differently for now. They are different, of course, but lots of people are writing that the email interface will be the key to broader understanding/acceptance. That may be true, but if RSS is only another form of email, it’s not what everyone is so excited about. (Although email is nothing to be ashamed of, since it’s (still) bigger than the web in its impact.) Will standards matter? A big push is starting now, and I’m not sure why.

While at the hospital, I finally finished The Hours, by Michael Cunningham. More famous, I think, for being made into a movie than anything else, but that’s not fair to a Pulitzer Prize winner, I guess — even if Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, and Julianne Moore were the leads. I didn’t enjoy the book. It was smoothly written, with interesting pacing, but since it’s built around Virginia Woolf, and deliberately includes her as a character while writing Mrs. Dalloway (whose original title was The Hours), perhaps I should have read that first. Per the academic site just cited: “Michael Cunningham’s novel of that title [The Hours] is a modern adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway, a fascinating read especially for those who know the Woolf novel.” Anyway, glad to have put this one behind me.

We’re home with Paton now, and it’s time to start again. This time, we know how it works with a new baby, but a few things are different. Most of all, Benjamin is here, and we’re trying to weave him into the Paton picture, and vice versa. Also, Paton will probably be different, although these earliest days of infanthood have to be pretty much the same. We have some help again, fortunately, in the form of my parents. Extra hands and more. Phew. Also, this time I cannot stay home for weeks. I was between jobs when Benjamin arrived (deliberately). I like my job now, and the economy isn’t in a place where I would deliberately risk something new just now.

That said, we have a sunny day in San Francisco, Benjamin and Paton are napping at the same time, and I have the computer to myself for a few minutes. Not bad.

Paton Donahoe Roberts arrived this morning. She’s healthy, and so is her mother.

More on search from Tim Bray last night. Very short, on a topic I’d like to hear more about from him, based on his experience. I know something about this topic from the user end and the product end, if not the technology end, since I worked on the now un-lamented Snap.com / NBCi.com back in the day. I even ran the search team for about six months, although admittedly more in caretaker mode than active oversight mode… but I learned enough from osmosis and listening to agree that “…it’s much easier to offer a good advanced than simple search.“

Someone on the on the online-news mailing list pointed out that Scopeware offers Vision Search, which is what Gelertner was talking about as an interface (screenshot). Scopeware is by Mirror Worlds Technologies, Gelertner’s company.

Fueled by the research and writings of Dr. David Gelernter, world-renowned Yale professor and our Chief Scientist, and Dr. Eric Freeman, Mirror Worlds Technologies was established in 1997 to develop and commercialize the patented technology based on this premise.

This makes the essay seem a bit more like self-serving marketing, at least in its interface ideas — but still provoking, in the best ways.

Command-K is my favorite keystroke combo in NNW… Mark All Unread, on a per subscription basis. It’s about 30 minutes later, and the red number is gone. Until tomorrow, anyway.

I use NetNewsWire Lite to read various news sources, blogs and otherwise. It’s somewhat daunting to start my day’s reading (usually at night, like now) with a big red “211” on the Dock icon. That means 211 headlines unread, from my 51 subscriptions. I fire through most of them, opening Safari window after Safari window until I’ve knocked off all the unread items in NNW, and then I start reading/scanning open Safari windows. It doesn’t take that long, and I shouldn’t feel so compelled to go through it all, but I like knowing the pulse of this “loosely coupled community” (my phrasing). Clearly, lots of interest today… or lots of free time. 😉

A sharp image, from David Gelernter’s essay “The Next Great American Newspaper,” in The Weekly Standard. This pointed vision describes the traditional ‘reverse pyramid’ style of journalism, but he’s more hunting the great beast that is traditional journalism. Style and bias are part of the story, but the larger point is about time vs. space. Newspapers excel as objects in space, but the web, Gelernter says, is about “objects in time.” Of course, I’m immediately drawn to ideas that build on our changing concept of time, and what its value is.

The essay mixes two ideas, one ideological and one technological. First, The New York Times (and New York) needs a cultural/political equivalent from the Right (conservatively speaking). Second, the web is the place to build this newspaper, because time is the defining part of our lifestyles today, and only the web as a medium both reflects and shapes our ongoing relationship with short, sharp snippets of time. And, like the New York Times (online and print), a web newspaper speaks to a broader audience than just New York, although place does still matter.

Instead of writing one longish piece, reporters will write (say) five short ones–will belt out little stories all the time, as things happen. They will shape their news stories to the shape of the news, of experience, of time. The string of aphorisms–prose in stanzas–is a perfect form for fresh and timely news. Perfect also for a nation where concentration spans seem to halve every year.

While this fits the blog metaphor well, I think it also speaks more to the density of our media experience, combined with the poor (if improving) quality of our computer screens. Harder to concentrate when your eyes have to work harder.

The navigational ideas he posits here (“cards” of information in streams) seem to be a return to some of the themes he’s been hitting again and again in his academic writing and professional software career. I’m just happy he’s pushing something different. Whether it works or not, it stretches the brain a bit, just as Amazoning the News did (and does). Hard to be revolutionary in this economy, or maybe I’m just missing the forest for all the branches — let alone trees, but I still hope to produce some of the ideas from the Hypergene thought piece from 2001 in the real-world of 2003 and beyond.

Let’s leave Gelernter with one more quote, a parenthetical line I loved: “Third law of information: The interface is the application. The right picture is everything.” Maybe I should know what the first two ‘laws’ of information are (I don’t… let me know), but I know that selling an idea these days most often need a picture. Words won’t do it. And I can’t draw… an exercise for the reader is whether I can write well enough to overcome that.

…a good search engine for this blog. OK, I’m not really that desparate, but until I can figure out a better month-long archive scheme, I have found myself frustrated by trying to find something I’ve written, after less than three months of posting!

Since I’m lazy, I will read Tim Bray’s series on full-text search, just beginning with background now, and (maybe) then I’ll see if the solution he comes up with is something a non-geek can implement. Otherwise I’ll resort to the Google box like most others. I’ve already changed my robots.txt so that this blog is indexed by polite spiders. I’ll have to see how much extra spider traffic that generates.

Do you remember the TV show “In Search Of…”? If you do, you’re at least a contemporary, maybe older. Except that now the classic Leonard Nimoy-hosted shows run on the History channel. TV never dies, it just finds a new outlet.