Scripting News for 9/14/2006

Evan Williams explains how Odeo screwed up.  

“Mr Gutman” on second-time entrepreneurs. 

Now if Podshow’s CEO, Ron Bloom, Odeo’s competitor, were as insightful and open as Evan Williams, he would say something like this. “I thought all the technology for podcasting had been invented, but boy was I wrong!”  

Rex Hammock in 2/05: “Opportunism should never be confused with passion.” 

Engadget on Microsoft’s new iPod-alike, Zune. 

Todd Bishop: “If Zune is to become the long-awaited iPod killer Microsoft so clearly wants it to be, it’ll have to compete on a much more elusive battlefield: coolness.”  

Michael Gartenberg: “I can share any song on the device to any other device in range. DRM content or plain MP3s but don’t get too excited.” 

I don’t understand what Amazon is doing with Promotion via API and RSS for ECS, but it’s intriguing. Are the feeds a demo, or is that real data? 

Mobile-friendly news 

The next step in the evolution of mobile rivers is a way for a feed to link to articles that render well on mobile devices. I don’t want to propose a specific way of doing that, I could, but then the argument would be why I think I have the right to do that, which is an old boring argument that I’d rather side-step. Rather, I’m going to ask the great minds of the tech blogosphere to mull this over, discuss it if you like, and propose some solutions. Even better if you are a source of content, and can vouch for a bunch of feeds that will support your proposed solution. Then we can seek a second party and a third to support the first workable solution that pops up.

Let me try to state the problem concisely, so we’ll know when we have a solution.

First, consider the BBC and NY Times rivers. When I link to an article, I start with the URL to the “rich” HTML rendering, and apply an algorithm to turn the rich URL into a URL that points to a “plain jane” page, one which renders well on a mobile device. For example, here’s an article on the BBC website, and here’s the mobile-friendly version. See the difference? On a desktop or laptop, you’d probably prefer the rich version, but on a mobile device, like my Blackberry, the plain version works much better.

I was able to figure out a mapping for the Times and the BBC, but clearly that won’t work in every case. Somehow each feed is going to have to tell us where the mobile-friendly version is. And that means, inevitably, using a namespace (creating a new one or using an existing one) to link from an item to its mobile-friendly rendering. Or so it seems to me. I could be wrong. Figure it out and let me know. I’ll use whatever works and is supported by the community. (But the clock is ticking, I have an app almost ready to deploy that needs the solution.)

PS: Anticipating that people are going to suggest using Google’s algorithmic method of generating mobile-friendly content, I’d rather not depend on Google, I’d rather the content people take care of this. Building too much on one large platform is a precarious way to build. We’ve already found, many times, that Google doesn’t care what we think. So let’s fix this ourselves, it’ll work much better that way, imho.

PPS: I linked this into a new Technical Issues section in the NewsRiver.org directory.