WombatNation

‘AOL Journals’ To Bring Blogs To Millions (TechNews.com)

AOL will give members three ways to update their blogs — through an online template with blank boxes for text input, through AOL’s instant-messaging system or by telephone. The phone option will be available only to subscribers to the extra-cost “AOL by Phone” service, who will be able to leave voice messages that will be posted as MP3 sound files.

Dang! I should have patented the invention of using a VoiceXML application to post to a blog by telephone when I had the chance. Actually, I would be pretty disappointed if the U.S. Patent Office granted a patent for phoneblogging. Nonetheless, given the kinds of ideas Amazon and others have recently been able to patent, I wouldn’t have been shocked if they would have given me a patent for the invention. Based on estimates I have read that an independent inventor can expect to spend about $10,000 just for the US patenting process, there was no way I would have gone for the patent unless I planned to license it or turn it into a real business.

The AOL by Phone voice portal was spawned from AOL’s purchase of Quack.com back in August 2000. I can’t remember who TellMe and BeVocal’s other competitors were back then. I didn’t start doing VoiceXML development until sometime late in 2001.

I started working on PhoneBlogger in late October 2002 and released it in January 2003. Between vacation, my real job, and not having a real plan for what to do with PhoneBlogger, I took far too long to finish it up. If I had been able to work on it full time, I’m sure I could have completed it start to finish in less than two weeks, maybe even less than one. That’s far more of a tribute to the richness of the code libraries and tools (VoiceXML, Python, xmlrpclib, TellMe VXML hosting service, Lame, SoX, etc.) I was able to use than my coding skills.

The biggest nightmare by far in developing PhoneBlogger was dealing with XML documents in JavaScript. I estimate that I spent about 1/4 of the total time writing code and unit tests and then debugging what should have been some really simple code for reading and parsing XML. JavaScript desperately needs better APIs than the DOM. In hindsight, I would have figured out another way to deal with the config info, but I kept feeling I was just a couple lines of code away from getting it to work. One of the hardest decisions for a developer to make is when to abandon an approach. This time I let stubborness get the better of me.

via Audioblog/Mobileblogging News via Joho Blog

ongoing – Pay For Placement

Tim Bray writes:

Adam Curry posted a note on Monday that I found pretty surprising. In the future, will you have to pay to get into RSS aggregators? Ouch.

Apparently, about a year and a half ago Mr. Curry purchased Radio and Frontier licenses, and then paid Userland $10,000 to be included in the feeds that the products come pre-loaded with.

…

I was emailing with Brent Simmons about this (by the way, his NetNewsWire comes with no paid-to-play entries). We both seemed to think that this kind of thing is OK, as long as it’s clearly marked as such, like the little labels in your newspaper that say “advertisement” when there’s an ad dressed up to look like a newspaper story.

When I originally started using Radio for a blog tool (since replaced with Movable Type) and a news aggregator (since replaced with NewsMonster and NewsDesk), I wondered why Adam Curry’s feed was one of the built-in feeds. His feed was one of the first feeds I deleted.

I’m sure someone finds Adam’s blog interesting, but I found the signal to noise ratio to be even lower than for Dave’s blog. Way too many posts consisted primarily of fawning worship of Radio and Dave. Of course, the ego stroking from a celebrity might have been enough for nearly any news aggregator developer to make it a built-in feed, but there are several other blogs that highly praise functionality in Radio that didn’t make the cut. So why this one?

Now that Adam reveals he paid $10,000 for what was essentially an advertisement that was not marked as such, everything makes sense. Whether or not Adam thinks Radio is any good (and I don’t question that he does appear to sincerely like it), he needed to protect his investment. If enough people claim Radio is great, that will create a buzz that will lead more people to try it. That, of course, leads to more consumers being directed to Adam’s “cult of personality” blog. Again, that’s fine. I’m sure that some people are extremely happy to have discovered his blog via the built-in feed. But, the disclosure of the payment has come far too late.

Now, he feels ripped off because he is afraid RSS will die out and he will lose his captive audience. So, he’s launching a personal campaign to reward aggregator developers only if they refuse to support the newer syndication format that frightens him. Wouldn’t it be simpler and more reasonable just to add another feed for the new format?

My wife surprised me with a Canon S400 digital camera a few months ago. Overall, I’m very satisfied with it. The picture quality is great and the camera is tiny.

One of the features I hadn’t tried out yet was the ability to record movies. This amazing camera can record 15 frames/second video at either 320×240 or 160×120 resolution with audio. Each movie clip can be up to three minutes in length.

While we were watching the Oakland A’s come from behind in the bottom of the 11th inning to beat the Seattle Mariners 3-2 Tuesday night, I decided to finally record a movie clip. I would have recorded more segments, but the people in front of me kept moving in the way. Next time, I sneak in the poison darts.

So, here’s a clip of Eric Chavez hitting a foul with Tejada running to second. Sorry it couldn’t be more exciting. Next time I will record more bits in hope of grabbing something better, like a fight between the team mascots or a very large person being cut off at the Krispy Kreme stand after the 7th inning. The clip is a 1.4 MB AVI file at 320×240 resolution and lasts about 5 seconds. I’ve used QuickTime to view AVI files (including this one) on Mac OS X and Windows XP and I’ve used xine to view AVI files on Linux.

Back in April I mentioned that Norri Kageki interviewed me for a column on Silicon Valley engineers who use weblogs for personal and business purposes. The June issue of IT Professionals containing this column came out about a month ago, but I have been slow about getting the text translated by a friend and then scanning in the relevant bits. Thanks to Norri for sending me a copy of the magazine and thanks to my friend Atsushi for the translation!

The column that Norri writes for IT Professionals covers interesting trends in the USA. Below is the table of contents entry for this month’s column. I’m not the person pictured in the column.

My name as written in Japanese is highlighted in the passage to the right. Atsushi’s translation (with a few minor edits by me) of this section of the column is below.

A chief architect Robert Stewart (age 38) working for one of the major telecom companies, Avaya, Inc., talked about using a blog as a project management tool. He hopes that “we can easily realize a higher quality of project management by using blogs. Also one of the advantages is that engineers at our overseas business partners and new members of our development team can grasp the entire project history very quickly by reading the blog.”