Symphonious

Daring Fireball:

NetNewsWire users get a generous transition deal: two years of subscription service to NewsGator online, including synching storage, access to other NewsGator software, and all updates to NetNewsWire released in that time. Considering that NetNewsWire 2.0 was a free update, this makes NetNewsWire 1.0 look like one of the best deals in Mac history — if you bought NetNewsWire 1.0 in February 2003, you not only still haven’t paid a dime in upgrade fees, but you won’t for another two years, either. And not only will the free NetNewsWire Lite remain, but they plan to add synching features to it.

Wow, I hadn't actually put together how good value that was.  When you add in the fact that at the end of your subscription to NewsGator online you get to keep using the software (minus the online-synchronization stuff) perpetually that's a seriously awesome deal.

Speaking of NetNewsWire, is anyone else noticing that sorting by arrival order is just sorting by date order? I'm getting really sick of news items appearing at the bottom of the list or getting stuck at the top. I'm pretty sure it never used to do this.

Anyone know of good HTML diff tools that actually work well? For that matter, does anyone know of any diff tools that work well with plain text that isn't line based, eg: the standard type of text you'd find in a blog entry or a book? I'm guessing a combination of word based and line based diffing might work okay for that type of thing but I haven't come across much that actually tries to deal with the problem. At least, not in a way that aims to provide a meaningful result for humans rather than just a form of compression for updates.

I can probably wrangle the HTML side of it well enough if I had an existing tool that could take the plain text and provide meaningful differences.

Scoble: Nick says Memorandum sucks

Nick Davis says he's done with Memeorandum and is going back to Newsmap. Says I like Memeorandum cause I appear on top of that page.

Well, yes, but that's only cause the rest of you haven't started participating in the conversation. Memeorandum is done automatically by analyzing linking and posting behavior. If you wanna be on top write a more interesting post. Hey, I bet this one has a chance of getting on Memeorandum.

I can't see what the big deal about Memorandum is. I went through the process of moving to RSS so I didn't have to check a web page multiple times every day to get information. I tweaked my RSS subscriptions so that they gave me just the content I wanted - my individualized little long tail. My choice of topics mixed in together.

Why would I want to switch back to the browser to use Memorandum and get someone else's idea of what's important, with a mishmash of topics that I may or may not be interested in, all based on what the majority of people are linking to. That's not the long tail, that's the ridiculously popular tail and the more popular blogs will float to the top more often because more people read them so more people link to them. Anything that works by watching what people link to is hugely affected by original popularity because otherwise people don't hear about the article in the first place so they can't link to it.

Now the obvious reply is that only a couple of people link at first and then it spreads because those people are read by a few more people and so on. The trouble is that it requires people to actually take action and get around to blogging it.  Most people don't maintain link blogs like Scoble so unless they have something to add to the discussion they read it and move on. I do this with hundreds of really good, interesting, informative articles each week just because I don't have anything topical to say about them or because I just don't have time to blog and forget about it.

These systems don't find the long tail, they don't find what I'm interested in because they have no idea who I am or what I'm interested in. I know that though and I've currently got 112 different sources of mostly relevant news being delivered direct to my news reader. Each of them regularly linking off to other sources of similar information that I might want to add to my list. Why do I need help finding more sources of information?

Scoble: Story about single-play DVDs is false

Ed Bott reports the truth: no truth to Microsoft single-play DVD story.

Yes, the news system can be hoaxed. But, it cleans itself out pretty fast. Bloggers, please include links to original sources and the source where you saw it. Also, correct any post where something false is reported. Help the system clean itself out.

For instance, will Slashdot correct this post?

Ah Scoble, how young and naive you are…  Slashdot holding back on a good ol' fashioned Microsoft bashing indeed…

Good to hear this isn't in the plans though, somehow it just didn't seem to add up for Microsoft to be doing it. Sony I might have believed…

It seems that John Dvorak doesn't like advertising much either. I've previously complained about advertising in various forms (1, 2, 3) so it's nice to see more voices joining the chorus.  In fact, also today I see O'Reilly Radar noting that Ad Skippers Do It With Research.

It is however a shame that Dvorak's article was so jam packed full of ads, including splitting it over two pages so they could show more ads that most people would have been distracted from his point, which ironically demonstrates his point.