Monthly Archives: September 2003

buzzword compliance, General Chaos

Stick that in your pipe and syndicate it

My old colleague Steve Gillmor apparently got a lot of grief about his RSS obsession, thanks to a posting by the Scobleizer (there's a reason he's got that knickname, after all). Without context, Steve's RSS boosterism may seem to border on the bizarre to some. But it's easy to understand once you put all the other pieces together.

For those of you who haven't been fully indoctrinated yet, RSS (which, depending on which faction of the XML wars you belong to, stands for Really Simple Syndication or RDF Site Summary) is an XML format most commonly used to “syndicate” content (usually web content, as in news “feeds” or weblog entries)–as part of a paid or free subscription to a specific content source. RSS “feeds” are pulled in by a piece of software and rendered for a user to read directly (as with RSS newsreaders like AmphetaDesk and Ranchero's NetNewsWire, and blogging software like Radio), or processed to be posted to a web page.

At least, that's what they're used for now. Because of the way they work, RSS feeds could concievably be the delivery vehicle for any number of things. Radio already uses them to deliver media downloads–subscribe to, for instance, Adam Curry's weblog feed, and you'll get an occasional video “enclosure” download to your hard drive.

In fact, RSS is potentially a great way to deliver web services to user's desktops as well. What if they were used as the subscription vehicle for web services–to, say, syndicate an interface to a movie schedule database, or a context-sensitive connection to an online bookseller?

There's already a similar implementation of a “channel” based content delivery system that's widely distributed: Sherlock in Mac OS X 10.2 uses “channels” to deliver web services to the desktop. Sherlock uses an Apple-specific API for its web services that governs how they're presented on the client–but what if that information were just provided in the description tag for an RSS feed item, and the link was to the backend web service instead of Jow Blow's latest weblog entry?

There are already some web services being delivered as RSS. An early example of this is Google Alert (which uses the Google Web APIs to generate an RSS feed of a specific Google search, updating it daily); Radio allows users to do something similar with its “Googlebox” code.

Amazon already has an “associate” program that uses links from other people's websites–but what if it delivered a web service-based front end, through an RSS feed?

Or, what if Microsoft issued all of its security patches via an RSS feed that was consumed by the OS itself at start-up?

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General Chaos

Punch-Drunk Cinema

Paula and I rented three DVDs for ourselves from Video Americain (and a tape for our daughter) over the Labor Day weekend. DVD rental is great, because it's even less of a commitment to watch something than renting a tape–you don't even have to rewind a DVD once you've determined it sucks. All you have to do is eject it, and move on.

The winner of the 20-minutes to eject sweepstakes this past weekend was Punch-Drunk Love. Despite the glowing reviews of Adam Sandler's performance, and some initial promise, there came a point where it was time for us to cut our losses and move on–but not before Paula and I picked up a new trademark conversational exchange for the week:

“Did you just bust up the bathroom?”
“No”
“Then why is your hand bleeding?
“I cut it on my knife.”

Our other choices for the weekend were Bowling for Columbine and Lost in La Mancha. And, for our two-year-old daughter, Paula picked up the allegedly safe all-ages Kermit's Swamp Years.

“Bowiling for Columbine” was great…at least what we watched of it. Since we got a late start, and since the film is 2 hours and 15 minutes long (remember, folks, check the runtime before your rent), Paula fell asleep about a third of the way into the second hour. I lasted a bit longer, but by 1:55 Moore was preaching to the choir anyway, and I figured we could always pick up with the movie again sometime.

“La Mancha” got thrown into the player right after “Punch-Drunk” got punched out. Originally intended as an extra for the DVD of the movie it documents the (aborted) making of, “La Mancha” bears witness to Terry Gilliam's attempt to adapt Cervantes' Don Quixote for the screen, filming in Spain. Barely a week into production, the whole thing comes unglued. You just shake your head at every cursed turn the project takes–a rainstorm literally washes out a location and some of the crew's equipment in the process; the exteriors are interrupted by the noise of F-16s dropping bombs on a nearby NATO bombing range…you begin to understand why Orson Welles tried for over 25 years to make a Quixote film without ever completing it. The video is better (and shorter) than Project Greenlight could ever hope to be.

The really bad surprise was “Kermit's Swamp Years.” I was watching it with my daughter, who started to lose interest–and it was a good thing, because the bad guy in the movie turns out to be a high school biology teacher who relishes frog dissection a bit too much–in fact, his subjects are ALIVE during the dissection apparently, as he straps one of Kermit's panic-struck swamp friends to the dissection tray. Who the hell wrote this? Who the hell let this be filmed? An otherwise bland coming-of-age frog tale is turned into a PETA activist's nightmare.

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