If true, it is a scandalous story. I don’t usually read user agreements anymore. Most people I know don’t either. But the idea that those agreements may not even be available to you for reading is scary. I hope it gets some traction in the media. (Via Dan Gillmor).
Gillmor has lately become a big champion for the mainstreamization (my contribution to the English language) of RSS. He linked to a story by Steve Outing which suggested that RSS can be a good alternative to e-mail for getting newsletters to subscribers:
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I strongly encourage all my readers to play around with RSS (ie those who are not already using an RSS reader). I am currently using the beta version of a product called FeedDemon. It is incredibly easy to set up and use. By far the best RSS solution that I have seen so far. The product is available for trial download and is expected to be priced ( I read at $29 at a review site) when it is launched. But there are plenty of other very good RSS readers available for free downloads. The problem is not so much of finding one, but that of choosing one from the many that are available. I had used one that I was not particularly happy with for a while and have been looking around for a better choice. There simply are too many choices.
If you are a serious news consumer and / or surf a lot, you are going to have to get used to RSS. A few good places to look for information on RSS are Syndic8 and lockergnome. Mark Pilgrim has been an RSS evangelist for the last few years and has an extensive archive on his weblog on the subject.
I would not have been able to keep up with all the weblogs and news outlets that I want to keep up with, if it were not for RSS.
Talking of weblogs. Tanya Rabourn recently posted two very useful stories on facet mapping. In the first post, she explained how she implemented facet maps for her site. In the second, she provided links to two new MT plugins that would achieve the same end. I am not exactly knowledgeable about the MT internals and am yet to digest the information on those pages. But the idea of facet mapping is intuitive and it ties into my troubles with categorization. I was also intrigued to read about the reference to Dr. Ranganathan:
For Ranganathan, the problem with the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classification systems is that they used indexing terms that had to be thought out before the object being described could fit into the system. With the explosion of new information early in the 20th Century, the enumerative, or pre-planned, systems could not keep up. Ranganathan’s solution was the development of facets. This idea came to him while watching someone use an erector set (Garfield, 1984)
Rather than creating a slot to insert the object into, one starts with the object and then collects and arranges all the relevant pieces on the fly. This allows for greater flexibility and a high degree of specificity
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Anil Dash hinted (while linking to Tanya’s post) that MT is planning to roll out something similar to facetmapping on MovableType Pro.