I’ve been playing around with various browser based news aggregators, since I didn’t really feel like using a seperate program like Feeddemon. Feeddemon is also commercial software. I tried several options. First there is Sage, an extention for Firefox. However, I found Sage to be a little too limiting for my liking. I also had a look at Lektora and Onfolio. These are both browser addons, but are both commercial software (although Lektora is free for the moment).

Finally, I have decided to use Bloglines in combination with some Firefox extentions, namely Bloglines Notifier and Live Lines. I like the fact that I can use Bloglines from any computer without installing any software or having to carry around my latest OPML file.

You can view my subscriptions at Bloglines.

Man peed way out of avalanche

A Slovak man trapped in his car under an avalanche freed himself by drinking 60 bottles of beer and urinating on the snow to melt it.

Cheney the Bum

At yesterday’s gathering of world leaders in southern Poland to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the United States was represented by Vice President Cheney. The ceremony at the Nazi death camp was outdoors, so those in attendance, such as French President Jacques Chirac and Russian President Vladimir Putin, were wearing dark, formal overcoats and dress shoes or boots. Because it was cold and snowing, they were also wearing gentlemen’s hats. In short, they were dressed for the inclement weather as well as the sobriety and dignity of the event.

The vice president, however, was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower. Large image.

WORKSHOPMIDDAG ADBUSTING 12 FEBRUARI 2005

De Wereld Is Niet Te Koop organiseert op zaterdag 12 februari van 13:30 tot 18:00 uur een workshopmiddag voor iedereen die meer wil met het fenomeen adbusten. Als anti-reclame voor, en als creatieve actievorm tégen de voortwoekerende vercommercialisering van onze (belevings)wereld heeft adbusting veel potentie, ook in Nederland. We hopen hier met deze workshopmiddag een impuls aan te geven en vooral diegenen die aan de slag willen bij elkaar te brengen.

Omdat ASCII (Amsterdam Subversive Center for Information Interchange; zie www.scii.nl) helpt met computers en de workshops, willen we graag van tevoren weten hoeveel mensen er komen. Als je in de gelegenheid bent een laptop mee te nemen, laat dat dan ook even weten.

Kom je? Stuur een mailtje naar Agnes: a.m.verweij1@students.uu.nl.

PROGRAMMA
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project note on how to search a blogroll: There’s one example here: http://erikbenson.com/code/search-my-blogroll.cgi and Feedster also allows you to limit your search to sites in your blogroll (which you provide in OPML format): http://www.feedster.com/advanced.php

There has been a lot happening around Seymour Hersh lately. First, he posted his new article in the New Yorker. In it, he says that the DoD now basically has all the power it wants to perform covert ops within Iran, without telling the Congress or the President anything about it. Of course, the DoD has a fierce rebuttal. Ari Berman also had some very interesting insights which basically come down to “Hersh was right, the DoD wrong”.

On his appearance yesterday on the Daily Show (watch from here), Hersh states that the things that happened in Iraq are happening now in Iran, namely WMD, failed diplomacy by the Europeans, Security Council resolutions, etc etc. Though he says they have learned not to go in with ground forces and do nation building. Rather they will try to topple the regime using covert ops and air superiority. Watch Iran in 2005!

Hersh also appears on Democracy Now! Also see the previous post we had about Hersh.

Hi y’all, i’d like your opinion on the following:

I think the categories at the left are overkill. I’d rather have a (competely rewritten) filter to browse through the categories (tags). To get an idea, have a look at the current archive. Auke and I will work on this afther the issuescraper has been delivered (in about two weeks). I think a filter/search bar at the top of the blog would be a good idea. Maybe a wikifier can be integrated there as well (hyperlink the nounphrases of a post).

I’d like to show the latest 5 del.icio.us tags of jacoplane, informationlab and justl0l at the left - as we are currently interested in the same kind of things and it gives a quick overview of apparently nice things.

Also a function which shows the recent comments should be at the left.

What are your ideas and suggestions or objections?

Remember when Robert McHenry, former editor of Encyclopedia Britannica interrogated the value of Wikipedia, basically saying that something like Wikipedia could never be trusted to be reliable? Well, since then, they have been busy increasing the reliability. Now, it seems the Encyclopædia Britannica isn’t so perfect after all:

A SCHOOLBOY with a fascination for Poland and wildlife has uncovered several significant errors in the latest — the fifteenth — edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Lucian George, 12, a pupil at Highgate Junior School in North London, was delving into the volumes on Poland and wildlife in Central Europe when he noted the mistakes.

Ahh, the sweet taste of revenge. Check it out.

UPDATE: Check in the comments on more links regarding the fact checking and article validation happening @ Wikipedia.

eXeem

eXeem is a brand new Peer-To-Peer program, which is based on the BitTorrent idea. eXeem™ eliminates the need for trackers as nodes in the program will be taking their role. eXeem™ also features easy publication of files to the network as well as a rating and comments system.

Still in beta though

update: check comments, this program is evil >-).

Checkit! Hey! Why isn’t wordpress.justlol.org there? Maybe we need a catchy name for the blog? Something like “red hippos are cute” or something. There’s also the inaugural European blog awards. Though I admit none of those blogs are in my aggregator… Maybe it’s time to lose my obsession with everything online having to be either American or Japanese. We saw the whole blogging spectacle with the American elections last year, something tells me something similar might happen this year with all the referendums happening on the European constitution in member states this & next year.

Last night i wrote a script which provides you with the del.icio.us tag neighbourhood of a link. Just enter a link, the script gets the rss through durl and all tags are indexed and counted. See how other people describe the given link. As a bonus you get the rss as well

One drawback of the current script is that it only receives the top 10 people who delicioused, and assigned tags to, this link. Later on - time, I need time - i’ll have to find out how to get more results.

I thought it might be interesting to feed the outcome of my script into touchgraph. You start with a url or a tag on a topic and surf through categories (tags) and links. As pointed out in a previous post the start of a useful semantic web opens new ways to explore information.

As i was writing this post i did a technorati query for touchgraph, and what pops out as the top result?

Visualising the collective brain.

Delicious fed into touchgraph, and at the bottom

the touchgraph life journal browser

which actually won the technorati developers contest lately.

Finally, exploring information has become a journey where you decide what you want to learn (don’t forget wikipedia). Let’s see what the future has got in mind

I was surfing http://www.technorati.com/tag/ lately, querying philosphy and what did i get back? Well, have a look. I really like the rise of searching through user defined tags together with providing it in rss. Rss makes it very flexible data to play with.

Got 2 try out furl some day. Apparently it

… opens up a new window with the title and URL of the page you are looking at already filled in. You then have the option of adding comments to, rating, and categorizing the page.

Something like a blog and del.icio.us at the same time? We haven’t seen the end of new social software connections yet

Technorati and del.icio.us remember me of the lifespan of bittorrent. As soon as something is hyped out other links will be at the top of the search results. Good to find current information about tags (topics?, issues?). How will it do on old but relevant information? What will the effect of massive amounts of users be? Won’t there be to much noise?