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When it takes me a few weeks to write up a book I’ve read, there’s little chance I’m going to do more than the minimum when it comes time to note thoughts here. Neal Stephenson’s The System of the World is the third and final volume in The Baroque Cycle. I pity those who wade into this swirl of characters, history, and interlocked stories at this late juncture. Stephenson, or his publisher, “minds the gap” by including a two page introduction titled “The story thus far…” which is helpful. Still, if you’ve read the earlier volumes (Quicksilver and The Confusion) as I have, System is a worthy read. I won’t summarize 887 pages, but I will say I’m glad there were maps in the hardcover’s endpapers of early 18th-century London, including a higher-scale section detailing the Tower of London, which plays a prominent role in the novel. I needed the maps, and I try and imagine what Stephenson’s workplace must have looked like while he was writing this book. To steep yourself in history, yet live in the modern world, requires an extended period of willful blindness. Or I could just call it focus. Glad to see Stephenson swims in this attribute. Maybe writing it out longhand was the answer. No internet, tempting with its email or RSS reader… hmmmm… RSS (hear Gollum’s “My precioussss” voice).

One web complaint: there are no useful links available beyond the author’s home page because despite the admirable MetaWeb, the rest of Stephenson’s web presence is visually interesting but hard to link to or otherwise address. A pop-up and Flash intro? Not what I would have expected from the author of In the Beginning . . . Was the Command Line.

Randy Charles Morin on The RSS Blog notes: “I’ve noticed that I enjoy linking more to people w/ trackbacks enabled than those who do not have trackbacks enabled.” (We’ll see if my TrackBack link to Randy’s post succeeds.) That was certainly a part of supportingTrackBack on CNET News.com. Since posting about the public introduction, I’ve monitored the links and found lots of interesting places around the web where people are commenting on news stories. Honestly, I’d like to see even more, because I still can manually find many more links to News.com stories on other sites that are not recorded automatically.

I think it takes more public evangelism to get

• those whose systems will send a trackback/pingback to remember that News.com accepts them, and displays them
• those whose systems don’t yet send a trackback/pingback to add that capability

CNET News.com itself falls in the latter category, for now, so I’m not throwing stones, but I do hope to help the bootstrapping process along. On Friday, News.com started automatically sending notice to Pingomatic.com when there is new content on the site, and letting those redistributed pings pass on the word. I have no idea what effect that will have, but I don’t think it can hurt.

MacMerc, a site I loosely follow via their feed, pointed me to the Content Management Comparison Tool at CMS Matrix. And then I see Richard point to a comparison of hosted blogging platforms. Content management (what a phrase) in the air.

The hard part remains creation, regardless of the tool or platform. But it’s true that better tools give fewer excuses for avoiding the harder work of creation.

Talking with a colleague today about when GPS-enabled digital cameras will be the norm (did someone say metadata?), and he said something to the effect of they are beyond prototypes, but not quite shipping here in the U.S. He couldn’t find the words for that state of the production process. I said: Japan. Those new gadgets get here eventually, though.

Thinking about that, using News.com Extra, I came across today’s SFGate article ASIAN POP The Gadget Gap: Why does all the cool stuff come out in Asia first?. How timely.

Here in the U.S., corporate buying tends to drive innovation — technology goes where business wants it to go. In Japan, technology is largely driven by individual consumers.

I’ll admit I haven’t yet read the recent News.com special report Japan’s sun rises again… there’s a PDF available for members, if you like offline consumption. I’ll probably take that route. I haven’t been to Japan, and the dollar’s recent direction (read: down) means that even were I thinking of such a trip, now’s not a time to go… but I do want to see it at least once, with a stop in the famous Akihabara.

Until then, I’ll just wait, like everyone else.

David Berlind wrote “What’s wrong with RSS is also what’s right with it for his ZDNet commentary this morning. He takes the time to skip past the tumultuous (to developers) history, without papering over the differences. Well done. More important, though, he doesn’t get caught in that rat-hole of an argument.

The most interesting part, to me, was his description of using the internal Wiki to program a mini-RSS aggregator, with all the choices and exceptions that required. David was kind enough to show me the internal tool he wrote about here, so I could see some of the specific challenges he describes. I use the same type of Wiki at work, although I hadn’t thought about using it this way, as I’d rather use a reader application.

Parsing XML isn’t the hard part; it’s delivering an experience that works for people, who all have different styles and needs, that lets developers show their stuff. I actually think writing an RSS reader has become a sort of “Hello world” application, with the exception that it’s not so binary about whether you are successful. In the case of RSS readers, you can make an application (with various open-source components) that reads and displays a perfectly-formed feed with little effort. The challenge comes when you decide that you need more than one feed. Diversity is a bitch. But it’s also reality. So developers who smooth out the rough spots — in a sense, hiding some of the diversity for the benefit of the person reading — are doing their customers a favor. Thanks again, Brent Simmons. There are other applications which probably approach (surpass?) NetNewsWire, but even waiting for 2.0, I haven’t felt a need to switch.

Two notes. First, XML parsing may not be hard… if you get perfect XML. It’s not so simple in the real world. I’m glossing over that minor detail! Second, as a disclaimer, I work at CNET News.com, which, like ZDNet, is published by CNET Networks. Like so many other bloggers, I don’t represent my company on this blog. These are my own opinions. I’ll eventually get around to putting something like that on my blog website, but wanted this in there for those who only read via RSS. Know my biases, if you haven’t figured them out for yourself!

Toto, we’re home. That’s the weblogs category in the main Yahoo directory, courtesy of Jeremy Zawodny. He’s right… I didn’t know that existed and I’m obviously too lazy to check before posting. I don’t mind the differences Jeremy points out between the My Yahoo mini-directory and the main directory, as I expect that if it matters, those will eventually be corrected. What I do wonder is whether or not the main directory is still vibrant and growing in an upaid manner. Having seen up close the work that goes in to maintaining a directory of any size, I think Yahoo should do what’s best for Yahoo. I see that there continues to be two options for submitting your site, and one of them is free. Good for Yahoo. I do wonder how much time and attention goes to that queue over time. Again, I don’t begrudge Yahoo their choice, but I’m still curious about the answer. I just submitted this blog. We’ll see what happens.

This “conversation” is more drawn out and public than email, but I appreciate Jeremy’s time in participating, even without a threaded aggregator. Of course, do we really need a threaded aggregator when so few folks are even using a plain and simple aggregator?

Bob Wyman of PubSub on the Yahoo FeedMesh group comes out with this epigram:

It is very difficult to publish and hide at the same time.

It’s not quite poetic, but it feels pithy, at least. The context? He’s explaining why syndication is less full of unwanted messages than, say, e-mail, because tracking the world of syndication requires “pulling data from people’s sites.” Of course, some technologies are about how to publish and hide, but — so far — attention hasn’t been abused by those applications and ideas, just copyright. (Just, he says…)

Nice Vannevar reference in Wyman’s blog title, too. The dream never dies.

How to Sell a Candidate to a Porsche-Driving, Leno-Loving Nascar Fan is a NYTimes article looking, after the fact, at the data which drove the media decisions for the campaigns, especially the Republican campaign. The entire article, in a phrase: “Democrats watch more television than Republicans.” Yes, there is a bit more than that, with details, but I’m saving you time, right?

The outcome? If you want to reach a Republican, target people who water-ski behind their Porsches. If you want to reach a Democrat, look for Volvo-driving WNBA fans. Some cliches stick, some don’t.

In responding to my notes about topicality, Jeremy Zawodny wrote Weblog topics, blogger micro-brands, and weblog classification. I think all three themes are interesting, but the first and the last grab me enough to continue.

Note: I agree with the blogger micro-brand comment Jeremy makes, but the word brand conjures a vision of The Brand Called You (Fast Company, 1997). Ouch.

Jeremy points out Yahoo classification of his and other blogs is… odd. I didn’t even realize that Yahoo had categorized blogs. Where does anyone fit? Is it just their placement as My Yahoo components? That’s what the example Jeremy gives appears to present.

When you search for John Roberts, you will get this blog as the only result. Hey, at least it’s included. But you don’t get the category placement as a navigation hint, which was one of the original innovations at Yahoo. You do for Zawodny and a few other well-known blogs. That makes sense — focus on what people will care about. But sort of interesting that you can only see the “Most Popular” in the Weblogs category. Makes me think that there are no other blogs categorized. I don’t blame Yahoo, for the same reasons cited earlier, unless you dump them all in a category called Weblogs and just leave it at that. I do wonder if, in the near future, bloggers will be given the opportunity to pay to be listed (higher?) in the Yahoo directory (or just the My Yahoo directory?), like every site must do for the main Yahoo directory now. (Is that still a big business? Still valuable for site traffic?)

All this assumes that the original innovation of directory, with keyword search added as a layer on top, still has a place in today’s web. That innovation was copied by many, including the original snap.com: directory + keyword search = more options for people discovering your classification scheme, which may be useful. But it never scales, which is one reason Google and others just jumped past that whole mess by attacking the problem differently. Yahoo still does show the category when they have it. Good for them, and for users, but they’ve made it a smaller interface element, probably to reflect the fact that many, many sites are not in their directory anymore. Also, they don’t show the entire breadcrumb, just current location and parent. Smart… it was too prominent in the past, but I guess Google’s success forced that change long ago. I wasn’t paying attention.

What does Google do with DMOZ? It’s not exposed on search results. Maybe Google uses DMOZ categorization in helping with relevancy (or used to), but who knows? If you don’t find out about that kind of categorization via search results on Google, it’s like that tree in the forest. Does anyone still care about DMOZ? Are the bitter wars that used to flare up about category editing, etc., still aflame, or has everyone moved on? I know I have.

I’m curious (now) about DMOZ because I’m fan of Syndic8 and the other pioneering work done by Jeff Barr in the syndication space. But I’ve come to wonder if this user-generated directory of feeds is suffering from the same (over?)reaction to the strength of search that has, in my mind, afflicted the Open Directory. In other words, a directory could be useful, but everyone is chasing after the search solution rather than doing the hard (impossible) work of agreeing about classification schemes. Are new bloggers submitting their feeds? Are publishers new to the RSS game, with multiple feeds, still submitting them to Syndic8?

On my personal classification, right here on clock, I need new categories. General, email, maps, books, tech, family, and movies don’t really cut it. However, I’m responsible for a strongly heirarchical classification scheme at work and the maintenance overhead is daunting. I’m not paid to muck around here, so when fatigue sets in, or other distractions arise (read: children), I let them. Also, since I keep promising (believe me anymore?) to move my blog to WordPress from Radio, I have little incentive to complicate things further.

As an aside, Stewart Butterfield ( think Flickr, and tags) is right in many ways when he laughs at global classification schemes, but there are business reasons where being confident that disparate items are connected is useful… so we’ll keep connecting the dots, at least within our corporate walls.

I appreciated Adam Kalsey generating his own Flickr-like weighted list to self-classify his blog after seeing Jeremy’s post. Comments there worry about the “best-seller syndrome,” where a big word (popular) will stay popular. If usage was the driver, it would, but Kalsey’s just monitoring his own output, after the fact. Frankly, even if it were usage driven, by what people read on his blog, would that be so bad? At a time when we’re drowning in information, the clarity of a list sure looks like a lifeline. Don’t we all want to hope that there is something to this wisdom of crowds meme?

I just re-read this, and I can see the threads connecting the various thoughts. Maybe you will, too.

Blogging about blogging is still interesting to many, confirming my point that we are still early, early, early in the adoption curve. Yes, the web accelerates the diffusion of innovation (years instead of decades), but we’re not there yet. Remember: very few people move at the speed of technology.

Because I don’t have comments enabled, and my TrackBack is erratic (something up with radiocomments.userland.com, it seems), I have to work a little harder to learn about what people are saying about my blog. Honestly, I rarely worry about it, because there aren’t that many readers and few of them (I think?) are bloggers themselves. So, when Mike showed me that Jeremy Zawodny picked up my thoughts and took them a bit further, I decided to learn more about what others might be writing. Note: I saw the references in my reader later that night, but Mike gets the thanks for pointing out the links first.

I think Zawodny’s practice of building in per-post links to external “link tracking” services (Technorati, Bloglines citations, and Feedster) is useful, but it also highlights how far we have to go. Or maybe I’m just a perfectionist, and I should be amazed that it works at all?! Certainly, it takes more than one service to get a clear picture. I tried the same three services as Zawodny and found that:

• Technorati found only one link, from Jeremy (same as my faulty TrackBack).
• Bloglines finds seven links, but only four unique posts.
• Feedster finds four links, but only three unique.

Overall, spread further than I would have thought, mostly thanks to Jeremy’s audience and Matt’s quick mention. Here are places I found links in no particular order using the tools above:

• Scoble linkblog
• Adam Rifkin, of FoRK (among other labels), notes Jeremy’s post in passing. You’d have to be looking for it. For a year or so, I was on the FoRK mailing list. Too much for me, but that group clearly makes bloggers look like slowpokes in the adoption curve.
• Steven O’Grady threw a link in to Jeremy, on Del.icio.us: “Zawodny on blogs as personal brands – syncs with Weinberger’s notion of blogging persistence”
• Ross Mayfield did the same: “Jeremy touches upon a key issue. My readers ask for categorization, and I won’t give it to them. You either follow me, or not.”
• Jonas cut to the chase.
• Adam Kalsey applies the weighted list to his own blog for classification after seeing Jeremy’s riff on my note.

Yes, I’m navel-gazing, but it’s fun to watch where the ripples spread… or don’t. I have more to say on the idea of classification, but I’ll put that in another topical (ahem) post.