Matt Croydon::Postneo

Category: Weblogs

  • Up The Ante

    Cool.  It looks like the bar has been raised at weblogs.com:

    The high-water mark is 1418 weblogs, on 1/7/2003; 12:11:11 PM.

  • XML-RPC and RSS (.NET)

    Dave Winer pointed to a few excellent things this morning:

    • Charles Cook updated XML-RPC for .Net. [This is a great little library]
    • Sumod has an RSS aggregator for .Net. [Cool, check out the screenshots]

  • Mobile p2p

    I had some pretty interesting thoughts this evening while making a peanut butter and jelly sandwitch. I’m not quite sure how it started, but I like where it ended up.

    What happens at the intersection of internet-ready mobile phones and peer to peer networks?  Of course when the two technologies meet, whatever you end up wtih will be fully buzzword compliant.  I’m trying to see past the buzz.  Bear with me for a minute.

    Cellular phones are finally beginning to have a decent bit of power, a real operating system, they are java-enabled, wap-enabled, and mms-enabled.  Bandwith is still an issue but it is improving all the time.  What if several peer to peer networks were developed to solve specific problems.  Let’s take a peer to peer geographic-specific network.  Everyone with a phone that is connected to the network is constantly broadcasting their location, and everyone recieves information about phones with in an n feet/mile/meter/kilometer range.  You can query a phone within your radius, request a chat, meetup, collaboration, game, prank, or anything else you can imagine.

    The only problem that I see to a system like this is bandwidth.  Peer to peer networks are notorious bandwidth hogs.  The thing I love about wireless/mobile p2p networks is that developers wound be required to write tight protocols and code to work on these limited devices.  Another thing I was thinking about was the possibility of involving servers or gateways in this mobile p2p network.  I’m pretty sure that with JXTA you can have different classes of nodes.  It shouldn’t be too hard to set up server/proxy/gateway nodes and end user nodes.  The phone deals with the gateway which broadcasts lots of bandwith and filters out anything beyond the radius specified by the phone.

    The great thing is you could have a ton of different p2p networks that do things other than share music.  You could share resources available to your phone, collections of user-taken photographs, expert information about a perticular location or topic, or anything else you can conjure up.

    I see the advantages of a mobile mob of p2p networks outweighing the costs of building the infrastructure.  I have a feeling that much of the work could be done for cheap and much of the load handled by broadband connections at home.  How would that be for disruptive?

    I think that this rant was probably triggered by the stuff that Russ said earlier today, so thanks Russ!  I definately don’t have the time to tackle a project like this right now, but I’m going to throw it on the back burner and let it simmer.  Any thoughts?

  • Peter Drayton Returns

    Peter Drayton returns to the blogging world.  Welcome back, we missed you.

  • High-End Blogging

    Classic Ingo Rammer:

    I’ve basically created The World’s Most Expensive Blogging Tool.

    His post goes under the hood of his ExchangeBlog.  Great stuff, Ingo!

  • Brent and Shelia @ MWSF

    Brent and Shelia are going to be at MWSF.  Find them if you’ll be there, and don’t forget to blog about it so we can experience MWSF vicariously.  We need a new word for this: Blogcarious?  Vicariblog?

  • Web Hosts and ISPs

    Kenneth Hunt uses pair Networks for his web hosting and likes them.  I used them for a few years before I started weblogging.  I never had any downtime, their email tech support was responsive, it felt like a mom and pop shop from when I signed up until I cancelled my service.  My account was on ando.pair.com, machine #45.  I had a hard time justifying the bills when I was only working a few hours a week during school, so I had to leave pair.  When it came time to put up shop on the ‘net again, Westhost was cheaper and several people recommended it.

    I miss pair though.  It was nice to see the company grow, to move to a bigger facility, and expand.  I felt the same way with CAIS (Capital Area Internet Service).  When I started using them as my ISP (shell + PPP, baby!) they were owned and operated almost entirely by women.  I think eventually they got bought by Verio and service went downhill, but for several of the early Internet years, they were great.

    Remember Trumpet Winsock?  Heh.

  • Pre-Bedtime Linkage

    Pre-bedtime news bits:

    • The Inquirer: Apple/AMD rumors continue.
    • OpenBSD Journal: NTP Basics.
    • Kerneltrap: NetBSD/Darwin binary compatability layer updates.
    • Use Perl; points to the latest Perl Review [pdf], which contains bits about parsing RSS with XSLT and other yummie nuggets.
    • Shelley doesn’t like the social implications of blogrolls.  I have seen similar things happen with Livejournal friends lists.
    • I’m going to hit a local computer show tomorrow in search of cheap stuff.

  • Other People’s Links

    Garth Kidd has a good Python roundup (you can run it on an AS/400).

    Mark wraps up a bunch of quickies in a post titled In Brief.  What, no boxers?

  • 3.141592653589793/and/your/mother’s/ugly

    Mark is an RSS bandit:

    Dare, we don’t bother validating version numbers. You could publish an RSS feed version=”3.141592653589793/and/your/mother’s/ugly” and it would validate. In fact, I think I’m going to go do that.

  • Erik’s Flu

    Hope ya feel better, Erik.

  • Blosxom 0+6i BETA 1

    Rael releases Blosxom 0+6i BETA 1.  Looks like static rendering is in this version.

  • Semantic a Go Go

    Mark Pilgrim is on the bleeding edge of the semantic web.  See what he can do with the cite tag.

  • Bloggers as ‘Open Source coders’

    Chris Gulker nails it:

    Andrew Brown offers a good comment. My thoughts: the constraints on coders are relatively obvious and straightforward: not so for ‘bloggers – in a way, bloggers have to work harder, and think through more ‘fuzzy’ undefined stuff, to offer a step forward… Harder, IMHO, than writing code with a specific input/output… you put yourself out in ‘opinion space’ where anyone can shoot you down… no code expertise required…

    Weblogs are a creative outlet for some and a semi-professional news gathering/commentary exercise for others.  The great thing about weblogs is that even if you only have a handful of readers and say something intelligent enough to be picked up, your meme might travel a long way.  It is the modern equivalent of annonymity and freedom that bbses and the early internet offered.  If you’ve got interesting stuff to say, someone will be listening.

  • Creative Commons Weblog

    Jenny points out that there is a Creative Commons weblog and RSS feed.  Cool!

    If I wasn’t so lazybusy, I’d write a spider to crawl the web, seek out content with creative commons licenses, categorize and index.  Maybe if I get a chance today, my friends S, S, and H might let me get a little devtime in.

  • I’ve Fallen And I Can’t Post to My Blog!

    Ug.  My weblog isn’t updating.  Tragic.  No new content since last night.

    Can’t get into the box, though Radio is still running (but not upstreaming).  It might finally be time to do a reinstall on my server.

    Update: A little Radio restart seems to have worked.

  • Christmas Coverage

    Ed Cone:

    For a nice Jewish boy from North Carolina like myself, the whole Jersey Italian Christmas is a multicultural awareness event, and the food is really good, too.

  • Happy

    Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy New Year and all that good stuff.

    Looks like there’s still some snow on the ground here in DC.

  • Emacs Blogging

    Among things that were discussed yesterday in North Carolina: Blogger.el, post to your weblog from Emacs using the Blogger API.

  • Blogging vs. journalism

    Chris Gulker:

    Bloggers are to big media what Open Source and shareware coders are to Microsoft and Intel.

    We’re disruptive.