Pito’s Blog

Welcome! If you're interested in the same kind of things I am, consider adding this site to your favorites, or better yet, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed (using BlogBridge, of course) . Welcome, and thanks for visiting!

Here’s an odd but important problem, at least for us here at BlogBridge.

When you sign up for a BlogBridge account, we, like many other sites, send you a confirmation email to verify that your email is for real.

Truthfully from a security point of view, I am not even exactly sure what it proves. That at one moment in time the person creating the account also was able to receive emails at an arbitrary email address. So what? It’s so easy to get a temporary free email account, that I am not sure what it does.

So that’s question one: does an activation email really provide any benefit to anyone? Any comments?

Now a question that has come to our attention is that in many cases a person’s spam filter intercepts the activation email so the person never even sees it, and hence the account is never activated, and hence the account appears not to work.

So scenario: The sender and recipient both want the message be received, but there is a a big-brother spam filter (like Google Mail, which I think is the bestest) that insists on sidelining the email into the spam filter.

So that’s question two: Is there any way to assure a non-junk email actually makes it through? Any answers?

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Check out this
post from ScienceBlogs :
Combined Feed:
53%
of People Prefer Pie Charts [The World’s Fair]

Not sure if this is
serious or not Reminds me of the old joke "94% of all statistics
cited are invented ON THE SPOT!

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Before I discuss this new product idea I am turning over in my mind, I want to say a few things about why I keep working in this area. I mean there are so many people working on aggregators, and after all Microsoft is building it into IE, and it’s been in FireFox for a while. Why bother?

I’ve thought all along, and I still believe, that all these blog readers, or aggregators, or whatever you want to call them are really important but still very primitive.

I’ve also said and still believe that all of them, BlogBridge included, are very much generation zero, and are more or less following the same pattern, in a way set by email readers.

The reason I am very bullish on this space (and I use that vague term on purpose) is that there is so much useful, general, non geek, high quality information out there, that such a large percentage of people have no idea about, and yet if they could see it they would devour it.

Just recently I was reading Discover Magazine, and I came across an interesting article that mentions that mathematician Peter Woit has a blog called “Not Even Wrong.” I’ve not looked at that yet, but, I am intrigued. Every day I come across an example of that.

So I say: Are you interested in Politics? Geology? Mathematics? Joint Ventures? Model Airplanes? Medicine? Rock and Roll? I can guarantee that I can find information on your passion that you will want to look at as often as you look at your magazine subscriptions.

This is my belief: great stuff, regularly written, by experts in every field, is there (supply.) There is a large class of people who would stand up and cheer if we could bring that information to them easily. (demand)

I want to help bring those two together.

The answer is not a better aggregator. It’s something else.

Technorati Tags: aggregators

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Check here for the details! This will be an overview of BlogBridge 3.0 and the Feed Library, come one,  come all!

Technorati Tags: skype, skypecast

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Just announced over on the BlogBridge site, BlogBridge 3.0. Check it out! I think you’ll like it. It has lots of new goodies, too many to mention here, but see the announcement for the juicy details!

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I couldn’t resist, and so who knows why, we (Aleksey and I) have built a new product in the BlogBridge family. We call it BlogBridge: Library. It’s a software application that customers can run on their own servers which provides a nice, flexible, powerful library of RSS Feeds, OPML Reading Lists and Podcasts. The idea is that the customer supplies the content and gets the software from us. Kind of a private iTunes Store for Blogs, Reading Lists and Podcasts.

It’s targeted at any organization who wants to create a library of blog and related information for a certain audience. We were focused on companies or other organizations building a library for their employees or users, inside their firewall. But equally valid is a library of feeds running on a public site for a certain audience.

Read  more about it here!

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, library

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glenn has been busy today. A series of very intriguing posts, all made today, a Sunday no less. I can remember when glenn insisted on keeping his Sunday’s clear of anything non-recreational. You should check out his blog, there’s lots of good stuff there.

This one caught my eye - “RSS is not a goal” wherein I encountered this especially meaningful (to me) paragraph:

“And in the meantime, if I were working on any kind of RSS/OPML-related application, I would take a day or two to stop and think about my goals, not in terms of today’s syntaxes but in terms of the flow of information between human beings, and between machines as our facilitators. I’d want, and maybe this is just me, to be working on something that not only improves the lives of people using the imperfect tools it has to work with right now, but would improve the lives of people even more efficiently if the world in which it operates were itself improved. Sometimes a broken window demands plywood, but as a tool-maker I dream of making something you won’t just throw away after this crisis passes.” (from “RSS is not a goal”)

Indeed - while I spend (too many of) my waking (and sleeping) hours thinking about how to make BlogBridge better, more useful, more compelling, at the same time I agree that RSS, aggregators, Feeds, Blogs, OPML, and all dat stuf are transitionary. They are definitely doing something that humans find very useful, but the whole thing is too much of a hairball.

There still is work to be done. Lots of it. glenn, want to help?

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, RSS

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Here’s an interesting article in today’s New York Times about how to get travel information in your your home page, like My Yahoo and others. This all hinges on RSS of course, which means you can bring your travel information into BlogBridge and other aggregators.

“Recently, these sites began allowing consumers to populate their home pages with similar information they’d find in e-mail newsletters, with two added benefits: all the relevant information from multiple sites appears on one page, instead of multiple e-mails, and the information is often considerably fresher, with several updates a week - or even a day.” (from “There’s a popular new code for Deals: RSS”)

Take a look at the article, it’s interesting.

Here are some fun links that you can drag and drop into BlogBridge to follow travel specials.

• Here’s Kayak’s list of recent travel deals
• Here’s SideStep’s International travel deals

One more thing: This is not just limited to travel deals. In fact many other shopping sites are providing Feeds for tracking deals. Here are some that I follow:

• DealNews 20 most recent deals on the web
• DealNews 20 most popular deals on the web
• Ben’s Bargains Network

Now you can drag and drop any of these into your favorite aggregator, but I’ve also created a Reading List so you can simply keep an eye on my recommended shopping feeds. (Yes, a broken record To use it, choose a Guide in BlogBridge, and in Guide Properties, Reading List, simply add this url to the list and you are in business. Each time I add a  new one to the list, you will automagically get it!

Technorati Tags: Bob Tedeschi, OPML, shopping, readinglists, RSS, travel

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Cori Schiegel convinced me:

“Personally, I want the data the AttentionRecorder is collecting to be used, but I don’t want to freight porting my feeds from one platform to another with those additional 10000+ rows of data.” (from elliptical…“)

While it may make sense to use OPML as a foundation for the format for Attention information, they are not one and the same and should not be inexorably bound.

In the world of aggregators, the one of the original and core use of OPML was interoperability — import and export of a user’s set of subscriptions from one aggregator to the next. The potential voluminousness of attention information would harm OPMLs role as the universal interchange format between aggregators.

Now the approach of using an app specific namespace for attention information is perfectly fine, as long as it is optional, and as long as aggregators can safely ignore it in cases when it doesn’t matter. (I note that from a purely parochial development effort point of view, this is superior to a new format such as XOXO which aggregators generally aren’t parsing nor generating.)

Technorati Tags: OPML, attention, XOXO

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There’s been a lot of discussion (follow these links for more links) of late about how to extend OPML, including what I wrote about some common aggregation related OPML attributes. From reading the discussions and thinking about it, I am thinking that a course correction might be better. Much of the discussion has been about an Attention namespace for OPML. I totally  support this and will participate in that discussion.

Yet there are clearly some information that many aggregators need to store with the OPML, which is not part of the core OPML standard, and also not really connected to Attention.

Faced with this question an aggregator developer can do one of several things:

• They can just create a product specific namespace (e.g. blogbridge: xxx)
• Or they can just include regular non namespace attributes in their OPML (which will in turn cause either the validator or other aggregators to choke.)

What if instead we try to define a general set of aggregator related extensions (are:xxx) to OPML? We could do an informal canvas and try to figure out a small set of really obvious attributes to put into this ARE name space.

To start you thinking about this, here is a collection of attributes derived from what BlogBridge and FeedDemon each store in their OPML. I’ve identified two sets of attributes:

The following have to do with bookkeeping and the operation of the aggregator:

• are:autoPurgeMaxitems - number of items that should be stored locally
• are:autoUpdateFrequency - how often  this feed polled
• are:numUnread - number of items currently unread
• are:numFlagged - number of items currently flagged
• are:numVisits - How often a user has visited this feed
• are:firstPostDate - Date of the first post

And the following have to do with local user overrides of information that can also be specified in RSS.

• are:userRating - user supplied rating of how ‘good’ this feed is
• are:userTitle - user supplied override to the title or name of this feed
• are:userCreator - user supplied override to the creator of this feed
• are:userDescription - user supplied override to the description of this feed

I’m sure these are already too many. My top level question to those of us responsible for OPML import and export within Aggregators of all kinds, what do you think? Shall we try to do this? Is it a good idea? Or shall we all just create our little parochial namespaces with different words for the same thing?

Technorati Tags: blogbridge, feeddemon, OPML

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