The electronic crystal ball has shown me the future. I see two words: "quantity" and "taking". The inner voice points me to the cosmos. I see a red dot. It grows larger. It is Mars. I see two robots rolling across the Martian landscape. They are madly photographing every rock they come across from 20...
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As I mentioned yesterday, there will be three types of challenges facing any effort to merge RSS and Atom: technical issues, goals, and personalities. Personality issues need no comment here.

Technical: a few technical questions that will need to be resolved include:

• Will the format have a namespace, or will it just have the...
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Dave Winer has made an offer to work with the Atom folks to create a single, unified standard drawing from both formats. Will the initiative succeed? I have my doubts.

There are three types of issues facing such a proposition: technical issues, goals, and personalities. I'll start off with an issue that relates to all...
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RSS may be the next big wave, but so far it seems only to have crashed down on the heads of those of us living in Tech Boom Bay. When we try to tell others about the revolution, we say shish-boom-bah, but they hear blah-blah-blah. Picking a colloquial term to describe RSS and other data...
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There's a lot of talk about RSS replacing email for various tasks such as online newsletters, so RSS is an email competitor, right? On the other hand, Aaron Schwartz posted today about an update to his rss2email script, which lets you subscribe to RSS feeds and have them delivered to you by email, and Lockergnome...
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From time to time, the issue arises of whether, and in what elements, data bite feeds should, or should be allowed to, contain HTML markup. There are a wide variety of opinions on the subject, ranging from those who feel feeds should be plain text with no markup, those who are okay with markup in...
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Finishing up a four-part series on data bite revenue models, today, we touch on the touchy topic of advertising.

Will we accept it? Hatred of advertising and the attitude that the internet is free (of cost) are deeply entrenched in net culture. Even non-intrusive advertising is despised by many. Intrusive advertising, such as spam and...
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The current state of pornography on the internet

There is no reliable way for a website to be sure that they are not delivering content to someone to whom it is illegal to send it. Simply saying "you must be over 18 to access this site" is in no way a form of control lik...
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Continuing my four-part series on revenue models for data bite formats, today I'll discuss factors likely to affect our acceptance or rejection of them.

Will we accept it? Advertising is probably the most controversial revenue-related issue facing data bite formats today. But of course, revenue is not all about advertising. Developers may sell their tools,...
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Stopping spam once the floodgates are open is much more difficult than keeping it from starting in the first place. How does one avoid getting their email address into the hands of spammers? Only show your email address to people who need it. Email is useless if no one knows your address, but it also...
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