June 24, 2003

Fresh slices of the RSS Pie

There’s a lively discussion on diveintomark about the road map for a new syndication format (i.e. a new version or RSS), which is in-and-of-itself a discussion of sorts on Sam Ruby’s Wiki currently known as Pie, but that name may change.

Wow!

I can hardly formulate a coherent opinion at the moment, let alone try to evangelize RSS to business associates and colleagues — as Tim Bray pointed out recently

I sure hope this settles down soon, because on the plus side all the talk seems to be generating quite a buzz around the potential of RSS.

June 23, 2003

Precision and Recall

Tim Bray posts his third in the series on Search. This one is on Precision and Recall. Here are a few good quotes:

“While precision and recall are very helpful in talking about how good search systems are, they are nightmarishly difficult to actually use, quantitatively. First of all, the notion of Â“relevanceÂ” is definitely in the eye of the beholder, and not, in the real world, a mechanical yes/no decision. Secondly, any information base big enough to make search engines interesting is going to be too big to actually compute recall ….”

June 20, 2003

The Motive of Uncle Orrin (no relation)

Based on the recent comments by Senator Orrin Hatch (no relation) and the ongoing reactions, I remembered a quote of his I posted back in February of 2001, which implied that Senator Hatch (no relation) was coming to the defense of the fledgling granddaddy of MP3 swapping … Napster.

Here’s the interesting quote:

“The Napster community represents a huge consumer demand for the kind of online music services Napster, rightly or wrongly, has offered and, to date, the major record labels have been unable to satisfy,” (Feb 2001)

June 19, 2003

Info Aggregator: RSS-to-IMAP service

The folks over at Blogstreet have released an RSS-to-IMAP service called Info Aggregator, which is pretty slick. (link via Blogroots)

However, it’s unlikely that I’ll be moving from NewsGator even though using the IMAP protocol does provide some alternative client options as well as remote capabilities.

The fact is I’m always in Outlook and my experience using IMAP has never been stellar.

I’ll certainly give it a try though.

BTW, I just tried Blogstreet’s RSS Generator and it works very well!

June 18, 2003

Nobody Uses Advanced Search

Tim Bray’s second installment on search…

“Every search engine has an Â“advanced searchÂ“ screen, and nobody (quantitatively, less than 0.5% of users) ever goes there. This drove us nuts back at Open Text, because our engine was very structurally savvy and could do compound/boolean queries that look like what today weÂ’d call XPath. But nobody used it.”

I used it quite a bit. In fact, the advanced search pare was what I would bookmark on most search engines. However, indeed, I was certainly in the minority.

June 17, 2003

Rumor: Microsoft looking to buy Accenture?

Cringely writes in his latest InfoWorld column:

“…one of my moles reported that Team Redmond might be looking to buy Accenture, the $11 billion consulting company. Apparently, Microsoft and Accenture have been engaged in some intense talks, with folks frequently flying back and forth between Redmond and New York, particularly during March and April. “

June 17, 2003

“You have a marketing problem&#8221...

Steven Vore pulls out a great quote from George Gilder’s book Telecosm, which I think seems so relevant to the music industry — namely the RIAA. (link via McGee’s Musings)

“When your product is stolen by thieves, you have a police problem. When it is stolen by millions of honest customers, you have a marketing problem.”

Oh how I hope the music industry is listening. Unfortunately I highly doubt they would see the relevance.

June 16, 2003

Office 2003 beta 2 “refresh”

PCWorld reports “Microsoft is on track to release its “refresh” of Office 2003 beta 2 to testers before the end of the month, a company spokesman said Friday.”

This is good news, because I’ve been having problems with Outlook 2003 freezing occasionally. Otherwise, the other apllications in the Office 2003 beta have been stable.

June 16, 2003

Search is Commoditized

A quote from Tim Bray’s first in a series on search technology:

“All search engines work more or less the same, and offer more or less the same APIs, and provide more or less the same quality of result.”

Interesting. I can’t wait till the next installment.

June 13, 2003

Word 2003 as an RSS Viewer

Mike Gunderloy has written up an article that demonstrates how to use Word 2003 as an RSS viewer. Mike did this cool hack by transforming an RSS feed into into Words own XML flavor, WordML — Of course using XSLT and a little VBS. (via Lockergnome)