atom

Just like users control what content they generate on blogs and websites and which urls they surf to, why shouldn't power users (initially it's going take some geekiness and some type of user generated aggregation software development but it won't look like JavaScript, or Ruby or C++ or any of the "secret priesthood of computing" software technology so for a few years it won't be for "normal" users) be able to control what web content they read without worrying about portals, scraping, RSS,Atom, or any other technology underneath. In other words user generated aggregation and user defined agents that give the people what they want how they want is something that can and will happen. In other words, Russell is right again :-) !

Russell Beattie is right about the future of web aggregation when he writes:

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Essentially, it's becoming more and more work to separate signal from noise, and it never seems that everything you want to keep track of has a feed. I can't imagine what it must be like if your job is to parse news for a living. Imagine being an analyst for a bank and having to wade through the cruft you'd get in a news reader every day, not to mention the monthly publications, etc.

What I think is going to happen is that both browsers and aggregators services in the cloud are going to start enabling a lot more logic and customization. We see the start of it now with Grease Monkey scripts and browser plugins and extensions, but I think a next level of user-friendly artificial intelligence is needed. Applications that parses web pages, gathers content, displays it intelligently and economically and does it all without magic (which is generally always wrong), but as directed by your specific choices of what you think is good and bad. ScraperWiki is the first step towards this sort of thing, but really it's only just the beginning.

Anyways, a few years ago I decided that the mobile web as a separate entity was a dead end because of the quickly improving mobile browsers and it turns out I was pretty spot on. It never dawned on me that the same logic could be applied to web feeds because of things like quickly improving server-side parsers and bad user experiences, but now I'm seeing that it is. I personally still wouldn't launch a new site today without having a decent feed, but I bet it'll be a short time before I don't worry about it, and I bet there's a lot of other web developers that feel that way already.

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For a sekrit mobile :-) project I am doing with Jen, looking for open source python code that uses NewMediaObject on XML-RPC or the equivalent in the Atom Publishing Protocol to post photos and videos. Jen has looked and only found code to do text blog posts. Lazyweb?

I've been sick and reading fiction books (I finished The Ash Garden before I slept at 8p.m. last night, recommended!) and not tech stuff but I had a dream last night that Nokia introduced the N999 blogaphone in 2007 with:

• 5 megapixel still camera with GPS and with a real xenon flash with lens and camera provided in partnership with Canon or Nikon and DVD quality video with a dedicated public/private button as I discussed in my blog post about ShoZu everywhere and the shoot-publish-respond workflow
• a full QWERTY keyboard like the E61 or an almost QWERTY keyboard like the Blackberry Pearl
• standard USB including power, standard headphone jacks and video out ports
• quadband GSM, UMTS, HSDPA and WiFi
• built in ShoZu technology that automatically over whatever the cheapest bandwidth the user has configured (which by default is WiFi, but those who are lucky enough to live in an area with affordable 3G could configure that too) uploads videos and photos with suspend and resume via the Atom publishing protocol to any website that supports this including flickr and blip.tv (blip doesn't support this today but I know they would in a heartbeat if they were the default for videos like flickr is with today's Gallery app)
• out of the box support for syncing with Mac OS X and Windows
• enough onboard RAM (which is about double the amount of RAM in the N93 I wager) to surf flickr.com/photos/roland :-) , run the podcasting client, run ShoZu in the background and the other apps mobile content power creators and consumers use
• 4 Gig of built in storage plus a micro SD slot for people like me who would put in even more storage, anything less than 2GB doesn't cut it for 5 Megapixel stills and DVD quality video
• costs less than $US 1000

I know I am dreaming (I have no insider knowledge about Nokia or anybody else in the mobile world's plans for blogaphone-like devices) and the N999 ain't coming soon but it is doable and I'd buy one in a heartbeat with my own money. This certainly ain't the Apple iPhone. Too power user and due to it's 'frankenphone'-like nature too cumbersome and harder to learn but I bet others want it.

Regardless, for me 2007 will be the year of the blogaphone for power users. Why pack a laptop when you can get all your multimedia consumption and creation done with a device like the N95? The N95 + bluetooth keyboard looks to be an early contender for 2007 blogaphone of the year!

[Assuming the pictures are better than an N93 and there's enough RAM to run the Series 60 browser, ShoZu, the wireless keyboard app and the camera app simultaneously which may prove to be an unwarranted assumption!]

Amen! This sounds like the RSS driven Real Time Enterprise Console that I and others have been espousing for years (2003, 2004) !

From Management by Feed (or How to take RSS Mainstream).:

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Now enter RSS. Imagine if every software system in your business published an RSS feed. Imagine if every important project in your company had its own blog. Imagine hundreds of feeds running through your business that you can subscribe to selectively. Imagine having immediate, reliable notification of important events going all the way up the management chain as soon as they occur. Now that's life changing!

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As Boris said at BarCamp Amsterdam (if I may be so bold as to paraphrase him), Jabber and RSS and Atom are the formats and protocols to watch; this is just one more proof point.

From Jabber's JINGLE comes out of the closet in time for the holidays | B.Mann Consulting.:

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Sorry, couldn't resist the Christmas themed title. What am I talking about? Well, the JINGLE press release* came out yesterday, announcing the official Jabber Extensions Protocols (JEPs) for doing multimedia over Jabber, or XMPP as the IETF approved protocol is officially known.

Here's the part where we learn that this is in reality a way for everyone to plug into Google Talk:

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In the future, everything (blogs, wikis, industrial and knowledge worker processes like CVS checkins and number of ice cream cones in the last hour!) will generate RSS (or Atom which I think are basically the same things) and it will be the basis for the real time enterprise console and digital lifestyle aggregator (thank-you Marc Canter for that vision) as I presented about at XML 2005 in my RSS Remixing Past, Present and Future last week in Atlanta

From Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog: Feed for Thought.:

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Back in October of 2003, when we first started building FeedBurner with hammer and chisel, RSS was, for many people, synonymous with blogs. Now that it's almost 2006, RSS is, for many people, synonymous with blogs. We still see quotes in major media that conflate blogs and RSS as if they were inextricably bound together. A, therefore B. Blogs, therefore RSS. In early 2003, it was probably accurate to say that almost all blogs had feeds and almost all feeds were derived from a blog. Today, however, while almost all blogs still have feeds, there are innumerable feeds that are unrelated to blogs. Commercial publishers have embraced feeds wholeheartedly; most web services and many search engines now provide subscribed results; and podcasts and videocasts are entirely feed-based while not necessarily tied to blogs.

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