False Positives: 09/01/2003

The Plague Of False Positives

Techdirt:The Plague Of False Positives. That and Lint.

Atu-gen'ing Color scheme's

iCal meets XML meets RSS.

Ray Ozzie asks whether (and why not) anyone has build a Feed extension and process to combine iCal information (calendar events) or vCard (personal contact) information.

Rather than manually re-key date or contact information publish it as rss feed, with updates as necessary.
Think about following your favorite sport team, Band, TV show schedule; publish conference schedules; sharing work calendars, school calendars as a feed.

Interesting application of iCAL and RSS.

Update (Sept 22) : Thinking more about this :

xml versions of iCal and vCard (which is owned by a commercial company) which would be a good thing, cause is would allow more people to publish this kind of info.

there is work being done on a xml calendar events. (use the google, Luke!)

being able to read iCal or kcal should be part of Outlook or Notes. (the Mozilla Calendar is here).

a RSS feed for most things is over kill:
1. Most event info is published once and never changes : the sports team, TV; School year (Parent Teacher days, school events), class schedules; conference schedules and lots of other things can be published once at the beginning of the seasons and import just once. A feed is not needed.
2. Too many items crowding my calendar, for which might need to separate calendars if I couldn't filter on categories. I would like to click a link to add a list of events and then control which events actually get added to my calendar from that list
3. If there is some event list that is regularly published, I what to control what get added to my Calendar, before it get there.

So, what would work :

Make it easier for people to publish this sort of infomation is widely used formats
a feed to notify me of new events at add to my calendar
a pre-add list to control what gets add to my calendar
be able to filter my calendar
preserve infomation in the event entry about where it came from (a perm link?) and a event id for purposes of correction and new information.

This subject is now beging picked up by various other voices : Jon Udell, Russell; Plan b and Winer

Jon Udell has yet more on iCal explorations. 2 value points : an advantage of making the iCal standard format into a XML format ( like the stalled xCal ) is that partner could extended it with addtional non-standard payloads (Links , rich test, meta-data ); and it could be used as part of a web service. These are both potential value adds, and allow experimentation between (or with-in) companies.

There's an ice-age river flowing deep under Canada's largest city. There has been for at least a million years but it wasn't until last month that anyone saw any real evidence of it.

The discovery of the glacial river happened when workers were trying to cap two artesian wells, part of a stormwater runoff project in High Park, one of the city's largest parks, near the shore of Lake Ontario.

Okay, I'm getting my shovel and starting to dig in the back yard!

Another fine "Know what you've signed up for" article

VentureBlog: Snidely Whiplash And The Liquidation Preference, also from the Oct 03 issue of WIRED : Why Stock Options Still Rule, Nothing lures top talent like the chance to get really rich. Watch out, Microsoft

One list, Many Options

Listamatic inspired List-o-matic to use CSS and semantically correct XHTML lists to generate navigation menus.

With great power comes great responsibility (Which explains why I'm in charge of nothing!)

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

That's the theory, anyway.

(Difference Between Theory And Practice) attributed to Yogi Berra

Saving the Browser

From Saving the Browser via Slashdork : Apparently stunned by the implications of Eolas vs Microsoft, Ray Ozzie of Lotus Notes and Groove fame offers up Notes R3 as prior art for the notorious Eolas patent. To bolster his argument, Ozzie used the Notes R3 feature set to recreate a scenario close to what was described in the patent. After the hard part of putting together a Notes R3 computing environment that included MS-DOS 6.22, Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and a circa-1993 copy of Excel 5.0 obtained from eBay, it only took Ozzie about 15 minutes to knock out a demo without any programming using the out-of-the-box UI of Notes and Excel."

Oh the ironies of Lotus Notes (and R3 at that) saving the browser, at the hands of which it has suffered so much. I look forward to the browser of 2014 being able to do (badly) what Lotus/Domino R6 can do today!

A Business Model Involving Free File Sharing

Techdirt:A Business Model Involving Free File Sharing The Key is : Is file-sharing an act of promotion or distribution?

The RIAA and some musicians see it as distribution of product, and therefore see it as lost revenue. Other musicians see it as promotional material, which will result in concert ticket sales, T-shirt sales, lunchbox sales, and sponsorship money. And yes, it will also sell CD's.

The key is to turn people into fans. No one buys CDs or goes to concerts of musicians they have never heard of. But turn them into a fan and you will have several years of revenue from that person. Give them the samples for free so that they can learn about you. Let them share those samples with other people. Word will spread.

Sam Ruby's RSS slideshow on RSS posted

Seybold 2003. Excellent summary on the what of RSS.

Advertising Execs Slowly Reaching Obvious Conclusion: Ads Are Content Too

Techdirt:Advertising Execs Slowly Reaching Obvious Conclusion: Ads Are Content Too. Right conclusion, Wrong RESPONSE!

Domain names--three strikes you're out

Businesses making the move online are falling at the very first hurdle, as too many fail to register an appropriate or memorable domain name.

O'Reilly Network: Managing Complexity: Keeping a Large Java Project on Track

Shanghai Poster: Vintage Decorative Art - Largest Selection of Advertising Posters from 1930 Shanghai era Online Catalog

RSS - A Primer for Publishers and Content Providers

Techdirt:What The Entertainment Industry Can Learn From The Fashion Industry

RSS Weather feeds!??

RSSWeather.com, which allows you to get (world-wide) weather forecasts as RSS feeds. It looks like it still needs some work but here's the url for Toronto

Serenity and The Outlaw Josey Wales

Space TV has started re-runing Firefly and monday nights, and my 3 reactions were : joyfuly watching the characters with an eye to how later events played out; sadness that it died such an early, pointless, death; waiting for the DVD set and the movie to arrive. Till then, Kip has a nice pieice Long story; short pier.: Rising again.. The above title was lifted from More Like This WebLog:- Monday, 08 September 2003.