Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

scriptingNews outline for 8/11/2000

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:8/11/2000; 7:38:57 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 8/11/2000
Msg #:19649
Prev/Next:19648 / 19650

Food for thought. "We're working on making the Napster protocol run inside Radio UserLand and Frontier. It'll stand alongside our SOAP, XML-RPC, COM, Apple Event support."

I just read a Business 2.0 article about Nullsoft. As I read the article, I wanted to say something to the Nullsoft people who did the MP3 search engine that was shut down. I'm sorry it turned out this way. I want more tools for exploring music on the Internet and I want to keep the ones we have.

A candid screen shot of a day in the life of an XML programmer.

ID3 information is key to making the Radio UserLand community work. After surveying the field of music apps on Windows and Mac, we decided not to add ID3 editing to the first release of Radio UserLand. This howto explains how to use two popular music apps to edit ID3 information.

If you don't have a lot of money, don't move to Palo Alto.

Tim O'Reilly: Unix server market share beats Win32.

Last night after emails went out I stumbled across this page on the W3C website, an early account of how the Web worked, by Tim Berners-Lee. This was done when the Web was still a writing environment, not just in Tim's mind, but in his software too.

Guiness ad seen by Bill Seitz: "Like drinking your favorite song." Bravo!

Speaking of favorite songs, the new aggregator is starting to look pretty good. Yesterday we connected two systems that previously were not connected. Just the right balance of XML and XML-RPC (I hope). What's most amazing to me is that, to my surprise, our early users for Radio UserLand are doing a great job with the ID3 information. The database that's building on the aggregator is remarkably clean.

Also last night I finally read Chris Locke's interview with Ian Clarke on Feed. Everyone's been pointing to it, and to hear the comments, you'd think Clarke was some kind of raving lunatic. Nothing could be further from the truth. I was struck by a question at the end of the piece. "So it's something more like Yahoo than Altavista," Locke said. "Yes. That's exactly what it'll do. It'll be like a Yahoo directory. But it'll actually figure out the categories for itself, rather than rely on anyone to tell it what the categories are." Personally, I have a lot of trouble believing that. I think the secret to routing around Yahoo and DMOZ is to give a good hierarchy editing tool to millions of Internet users, and let the cream rise to the top.

Specifically, my goal is to make it easy for people to create outlines that act as indexes on the HTML Web, and also as an index on itself. Music is the catalyst. As the World Wide Web gave us pages of text with links, the "World Outline" gives us expand and collapse on all kinds of things that are distributed over the Internet. It's both a browser and a writing tool. So from day one it's two-way, as TBL's Web was.

BTW, we'd be happy to work with the FreeNet people to make our tools work with their network.

FairTunes.Com is getting Slashdotted today. I'm making a note to myself to follow Jeff Barr's pointers to their XML format for music payment. Looks like something we could support in Radio UserLand.

Hey I just walked into the kitchen to get coffee, and heard Doc talking about his weblog on NPR's Forum. Isn't life amazing sometimes?

Today's song: Englishman in New York.

"Gentleness, sobriety are rare in this society. At night a candle's brighter than the sun."



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