When defining a file format like Atom, a balance must be struck between simplicity and power. If the format is too complex, people will have trouble making tools to use it. If it's too simple, it won't be useful for the things people want to do with it. Good design will yield maximal power with...
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Part of me wants blogging tools to explicitly support cross posting (posting the same item in multiple blogs), and part of me is afraid of what will happen if they do. I hope they do it, carefully.

Of course, anyone can copy their entry from one blog and paste it into another. And many blogs...
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Version 1.3 of the Info Bite List specification saw daylight on Saturday. Along with a few other tweaks, I removed support for multipart content types as a result of some research prompted by an entry on Tim Bray's blog.

On Friday, Tim raised the issue of how one goes about posting, for example, an image...
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Yesterday was the deadline for those of us in the United States to file our tax returns for last year. As I looked at that date, April 15, on my blog, I had an idea. An idea of April Fools magnitude. Rather than filing a tax return every year, we could just put our tax...
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A few days ago I read that someone is integrating Bayesian filtering into a newsfeed aggregator (sorry, I can't find the reference). Last month, I wrote about the difficulty of finding quality newsfeeds and proposed some ideas for creating a better newsfeed directory (and then built a newsfeed directory based on those ideas). Bayesian filtering...
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A few days ago, I mentioned in passing the idea of referring to RSS, Atom, Info Bite and such as "digest formats". The idea has grown on me.

What does "digest" mean? A few relevant definitions include: "a periodical that summarizes the news", "something that is compiled (as into a single book or file)", "make...
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The response to my recent posts, Why you shouldn't offer a newsfeed and Why you SHOULD offer a newsfeed illustrates an issue suggested by a post last month on Blogs as serious news media: the potential for bloggers with skewed opinions to skew the opinions of readers. "Why you shouldn't offer a newsfeed" generated a...
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Last week, I wrote a post titled "Why you shouldn't offer a newsfeed" that garnered a bit of attention. The entire post was written from the point of view of someone opposed to and annoyed by newsfeeds as a way of introducing the kinds of objections people might raise. It seems I should have included...
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In the beginning, web pages were text-only. They had a few options for styling, but nothing too fancy. Then came images, tables, Flash, Java, JavaScript, CSS, and oh, let's not forget everyone's favorite: the blink tag! Thus arose the occupation "web designer", the one who specialized in making web pages look great in every version...
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Some of us blog because we're full of ideas we'd like to express. But is blogging really smart? Lots of smart people don't blog. Which side do the smartest of the smart come down on? Do we blog because we think, or because we're not thinking clearly? Am I stupidly wasting my time at this...
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