Twitter culture wars over at the Times. One the one hand I want transparency and for people to realise the world and cyberspace is not out to get them. The trolls are irrelevant. On the other hand I realise the way we have set up our corporations and companies is not conducive to full transparency. The latter needs to change before we can really open the flood gates on what we think and come across in our daily lives. I believe it would be for the better but would take a period of discomfort and mistakes. §

An old fashioned website. Considered posts. Non-partisan. Treating users as smart people willing to read long pieces and engage with others. §

The “myth of anonymous data” is another story in the vein of how the web is simply surfacing existing human practice. The web has made it cheaper to find these things out but it was possible before the web. (New dateline? BW. Before Web. or BI, Before Internet.) §

Kontain, the “iPod of blogging”, has some unique design elements. The sign-up page is crazy but good. §

Hokey maybe but I can sympathise with this chap. He wanted to be an astronomer but was miserable at maths. Through computers and passion he changed this, rewired his brain so to speak and became an astronomer. I’m miserable at maths. §

It’s been said before but align user interest with investor interest by making the users the investors. The Peoples Software Company. Devil is in the details but the idea is grand. §

I have an agenda with RSS/Atom/XML-syndication but to say that RSS is dead, dying or irrelevant is to miss some important points. RSS isn’t a user interface, it isn’t a website or a meme-tracker. It is a format for data interchange, a format that happens to actually work, free of many of the complications of other formats. Atom even more so. Many of the social-media sites that are supposedly the RSS-killer rely on RSS. Many popular accounts on Twitter are powered by RSS fed bots. Much of the content piped into FriendFeed comes via RSS. TechMeme checks its sources via RSS. A lot of those iGoogle and Netvibes gadgets/widgets use RSS.

Show me a news source that doesn’t have an RSS or Atom XML feed.

What is dead, dying and irrelevant are complicated “RSS Readers” like Google Reader. Folders, full-text views, managing thousands of subscriptions, unread counts etc. are what is dying. Oddly enough we have the magnificent interface for email that is GMail, a real progression over three-pane email clients, but we then have a similar interface, Google Reader, for RSS. News isn’t email, we shouldn’t try and treat it as such.

Twitter and FriendFeed are interfaces onto data-streams, as is Facebook. As RSS moves closer to “real-time” so RSS will grow stronger and feed these social-media, data-stream interfaces. Soon we will have a web of real-time data-streams outside of vertical silos like Twitter, and it will be powered by Atom and RSS (and PubSubHubbub and rssCloud). Behind the real-time web will be RSS and Atom

The alternative is a web of disparate information APIs (Twitter’s, FriendFeed’s, Facebook’s) which I’m fairly sure we don’t want.

(Strangely enough we have a good, common, non-proprietary read/write API for information; AtomPub. Maybe coupling it with PubSubHubbub and the real-time web will popularise it.)

A typeface made from old tapes. §

Nice to see the Sony Reader Daily Edition eBook device now has wireless (3G via AT&T.) It also has a 7″ touch screen. A shame it doesn’t allow general web-browsing though. §

The web is becoming a simplified set of streams. DailyBooth does a Twitter for webcam shots. §