Why Not Hundreds of RSS Feeds From a Single Weblog?

Seth Dillingham writes about a conversation he had with Jon Udell weblogs and RSS feeds about “the need for a new meta-layer above them to associate them together topically without worrying about their physical storage location. (This is the opposite of Radio Community Server, which associates blogs together by the server they’re stored on.)”

But what really caught my attention was Seth’s take on the need (my word, not his) for weblogs having multiple RSS feeds. Seth wrote,

Lots of weblogs now provide multiple RSS feeds (RSS is a syndication format.) Unless your entire weblog is devoted to a specific subject, and you never stray from that subject, you might want to belong to more than one community. TruerWords, for example, could provide RSS feeds for posts realted to Conversant, Birmans, or digital photography. Those feeds would be picked up by different communities, and it wouldn’t matter that my site isn’t actually hosted by any of them.

This is something I have been working at in my spare time. Frankly, Conversant makes it easy to set up RSS feeds for distinct categories, the real issue is that most of the people I talk to have never heard of RSS.

But as an example, I have a topical faq about animal rights that automatically categorizes the thousand or so articles I’ve written about animal rights into hundreds of categories. The obvious next step is to create topical RSS feeds. For example, a lot of people just want to track what PETA is doing. So I have a PETA RSS feed that shows the last 15 stories I’ve written that are about PETA.

It would take only a couple hours to create RSS feeds for the other 300 or so topics, so people who want to track animal rights terrorism or maybe the Humane Society of the United States could do that too.

Seth’s and Jon’s ideas about a meta-layer that brings together multiple such feeds is the obvious next step. For example, a lot of the warblogs include discussions and critiques of Noam Chomsky. A couple weeks ago there was discussion about starting a multi-editor blog just devoted to dissing Chomsky.

But that’s sort of hard to sustain on such a narrow topic. A much better solution would be for warbloggers who write about Chomsky occasionally to offer an RSS feed of just those stories and then use something like Seth is talking about to bring them together.

The major obstacle to this, of course, is that the number of bloggers who are attaching any sort of metadata to their posts is almost nil. I’ve seen more of it than in the past, since Radio and Movable Type support categorization systems (though neither seems to have the flexibility that Conversant does), but most of the blogs I read are done in Blogger and have no categorization at all (which is extremely frustrating as a user. Many times I visit a site and would like to see all the posts a person has written about Noam Chomsky, but that is very difficult without metadata).

Anita Roddick Is a Moron (But Google Should Let Her Advertise)

Anita Roddick is a moron. She repeats the nonsensical claim by idiotarian Robert Fisk that John Malkovich threatened to kill him.

In fact what really happened was that Malkovich was talking to students when someone in the audience asked him who he would most like to “fight to the death.” Malkovich replied that “I’d rather just shoot them” than engage in a fight to the death, and named Fisk and a Scottish MP as his candidates of choice.

In the minds of lazy people unwilling to do any fact checking — like Anita Roddick — this has been transformed into some sort of overt threat on Fisk’s life.

But what is Google’s point in preventing her from taking out an AdWords ad just because she called John Malkovich “a vomitous worm.” What harm can come from allowing morons like Roddick to advertise?

Stop Comparing Videogame Sales to Hollywood Box Office

When anyone in the media wants to make the video game industry appear bigger than it is, they inevitably compare total sales of video games to total Hollywood box office receipts. John Markoff slips in this bogus comparison in an articles in today’s New York Times. According to Markoff,

Sales of game software alone reached $6.4 billion last year, putting the game industry in striking distance of Hollywood, which had box-office sales of $8.35 billion in 2001. And video game executives predict this year will be even stronger.

So what? A better comparison would be comparing game software sold and rented to total revenues from video and DVD sales and rentals. The reason no one ever cites that figure in comparison is that sales and rentals of VHS/DVD totaled more than $16.8 billion in 2001.

If you include video game systems, accessories, software and other items, total videogame-related revenue is at $9.4 billion. Sounds impressive until you realize that Americans spent almost $3.2 billion last year just buying VCRs and DVD players.

There is simply no comparison between the video game and movie industries as far as revenues are concerned. Total revenues to movie studios is in the high $30 billion range.

Source:


Recession? Don’t Tell the Video Game Industry
. John Markoff, New York Times, May 24, 2002.

Andrea Levin’s Analysis of National Palestinian Radio

Okay, maybe saying that National Public Radio has an anti-Israeli bias is a bit like saying that fish swim, but I was still a bit surprised by Andrea Levin’s analysis of NPR’s coverage of Palestinian terrorism for the Jersualem Post. According to Levin,

In a period of six days, from March 27 through April 2, when 53 Israelis were slain, not one of the victims was mentioned by name, not one bereaved family was interviewed, not one injured survivor was the focus of a story.

The attacks were reported briefly with some references to the gruesome details, but almost invariably with emphasis on how such events might harm political developments.

March 27, of course, was the date of the Netanya bombing. Now maybe NPR is just too busy to interview the victims of violence in the Middle East. Maybe it has its correspondents deployed in Egypt or Lebanon and could not get them to interview victims in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Not quite. After listing a series of terrorist attacks that killed 53 Israelis over the week in question, Levin notes that NPR carried plenty of interviews with civilians — provided they were Palestinian civilians,

Although none of these people or any other of the March terror victims was mentioned on NPR, there were human interest stories about Palestinians. The day after the Haifa slaughter [where 14 Israelis were killed in a suicide bomb attack at a restaurant], the network aired a segment devoted entirely to the discomforts of a woman in Ramallah whose large house was temporarily requisitioned by Israeli soldiers. The woman, who admitted the soldiers did not mistreat her family, declared that “terrorism is every time a human life is being threatened, is being terrorized and humiliated.”

Levin also notes that on April 2, Linda Gradstein (*gag*) did a long piece about Israeli’s stopping ambulances at checkpoints. Only a couple sentences at the end of the long piece hinted that the reason the Israeli’s were stopping ambulances was that Palestinians had been caught using them to smuggle explosives.

Levin concludes,

The depth of NPR’s ideological favoritism for the Palestinians is singularly underscored when, in a week that saw multiple massacres of Israelis, the network could not bring itself to offer even a glimpse at the personal side of the losses suffered.

Maybe they should rename it, National Palestinian Radio.

Source:

NPR Ignores Israeli Terror Victims. Andrea Levin, Jerusalem Post, May 20, 2002.

Polio Outbreaks Highlight Need to Eradicate Disease as Soon as Possible

The World Health Organization wants to certify the world as being polio-free in 2005, but problems with new polio outbreaks caused by vaccination could hamper that goal.

The World Health Organization has done an excellent job at getting polio under control. In 1988 there were 350,000 cases of polio reported worldwide. In 2001, there were only an estimated 600 to 1,000 cases reported.

But that success is also part of the problem. Until the world can be certified as completely free of polio, childhood vaccination must continue. But the oral polio vaccine itself can mutate and start off an outbreak.

The oral polio virus is a version of polio that is far less virulent. But simply through random mutation it an regain that virulence. It also has the ability to borrow genes from other viruses found in children it infects.

Now this sort of mutation would not get very far in societies with high levels of immunization. The problem is that there are parts of the world where vaccination is still only at 80 percent or less, and those areas are susceptible to outbreaks.

In fact just such an outbreak — albeit on a rather small scale — occurred in the Dominican Republic and Haiti in 1999 and again in 2001. As many as 20 percent of children in the Dominican Republic and Haiti are not vaccinated and are susceptible to a mutated version of the oral polio vaccine.

The latest outbreak highlights concerns over how long vaccination should continue after polio is declared eradicated, and also adds new importance and impetus to eradicating the disease as fast as possible to minimize the risk of a widespread outbreak.

Source:

Polio vaccine bites back. Tom Clarke, Nature, March 15, 2002.

Promise of eradicating polio experiences setback. National Center for POlicy Analysis, April 16, 2002.

Hong Kong Population Could Reach 8.7 Million

Many people think Hong Kong’s 1,000 square kilometers is already a bit overcrowded with its existing 6.7 million people. But projections released by China’s Census and Census and Statistics department suggest the city will add another two million people over the next 30 years.

The major cause for the increase will be immigrants, who will represent 93 percent of the increase. China allows almost 55,000 people from the mainland to emigrate to Hong Kong each year.

Source:

Hong Kong population set to swell. The BBC, May 7, 2002.