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Examples of which are, alta vista, wired, info seek, excite, orkut and even more examples at http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/mef.shtml. So will faceboook, myspace or even google join them, possibly, the power they think they have and the more arrogant and customer abusive they become with that pseudo power the sooner the end arrives.

What is it with the web, companies become successful with a business model, get greedy and try to exploit it as much as possible, and then the market moves on and they get left behind. The is hardly a successful web site left from the original players and those that are left suffered some pretty massive market share losses before management was changed over and they started to slowly recover.

With a lot of web sites it is the customer that are actually creating them not the site administrators, lose customer mind share and they soon learn how little capital value is really in them. Real success is being able to survive for fifty or more years (with a excellent reputation with your customers), not make some short term revenue, generate enormously inflated executive bonuses and bleed a whole lot of ignorant mug investors to death when the company collapses (but then I suppose that is really not true for the modern corporate philosphy, silly me).

One of the biggest, most stunning crash & burns ever. They ended up going out of business something like $60 million in debt. Amazing.

http://www.disobey.com/ghostsites/show_exhibit.sht ml/agillion

FeedDemon - yeah, to get your $25 worth it helps to OPML and how to transform XML, but that's what I like about it.

Straw - for when I'm in the Gnome .

BlogLines - web-native but with an API to die for.

AmphetaDesk - around for a while, great if you like shooting your foot of in Perl.

NewsGator - for Outlook - still, you can tweak it to feed event-extended RSS into your task calendar.

rss2Email - for when my Knoppix install has nothing better to do.

SharpReader - not as good as FeedDemon, but less expensive. There are a few others, the WikiPedia has a good handle on that - point is, how is the IBM tool different than all of the above? Are they not going to use RSS or ATOM feeds?

For those who want to see whats so funny about that, heres the current state as of this month.[PDF] (according to syracuse U)

But really everything i have been hearing in the last fews (didnt wired do something on this a few years ago? or was it sciam?) has been suggesting that the web will be semantic driven. Is this what a netwide OS suggests? or not necessarily?

ps = sorry im not a code geek...

Open source video card? Is it possible?... Perhaps,... there can be a release of the pain from black thursday....

Somehow, the websites you surf, including this one, need to get some financial recompense or they're going to fall under the cost of bandwidth and hosting.

People have been saying this for years.

That's true. It's a good thing that no website has ever gone out of business.

Not exactly. Ampheta's default interface looks like Radio's -- it has full feed text but not DHTML click-to-collapse/Mark Read. Worse, its X button removes that feed from your sub list.

There is another skin, but it's frames-based and defeats the your original requirement IMO.

If you're handy with a scripting language, I'd recommend AmphetaDesk or Radio Userland. Both run as HTTP daemons so any browser can connect. And both can be hacked to present the list any way you want (AmphetaDesk via Perl and Radio via UserTalk). Search for the free Radio 7 if you don't feel like paying for the non-free Radio 8.

Combined with AmphetaOutlines it is really powerfull.

On this page is a big AOL ad reading:

ADD MORE KNOWLEDGE

I took a screenshot of this page.

More knowledge indeed!

Surprisingly, none of them are that great to use IMHO...

I like Amphetadesk myself though. It basically combines your feeds into a simple webpage and views on whatever browser/OS choice you use. (Well, Windows, MacOS and Linux at least)

I've been using Peapod in DC since 1999 and I can't imagine ever going back to a supermarket.

My conversion was simple: my wife and I lived in an apartment and a typical shopping trip was capped off by parking in the basement garage and lugging countless bags (esp. those filled with cans) up a flight of steps, waiting for an elevator, walking to our door fumbling for keys, and then heading all the way back down for one or two more trips.

When we moved into our house, I figured the need for Peapod might diminish, but if anything we use it even more. We still an organic foods market for fresh vegetables, but for staples -- especially ordering cans in bulk for the pantry -- nothing beats paying just a little more for someone to deliver it to your door.

Now if only someone could resurrect Kozmo! Ordering fresh bagels and milk on Saturday morning and having it delivered 30 minutes later -- and returning your DVDs rented the night before in kind -- amazing...

Here are my recommendations for RSS/news readers for Windows (and other platforms):

If you use the Mozilla browser, NewsMonster is a great RSS add-on. It is cross-platform, and the basic version is free and open source. (There is a Pro version with a bunch more features for a fee.) It installs as a second sidebar in the Mozilla browser, and you can read feeds like you read email in most email clients. It also installs with about twenty popular feeds to get you started. It has a few bugs, but it is my favorite one overall.

Another one is AmphetaDesk. It is also free, open source, and cross-platform. It displays all your feeds in a web page in your browser. It runs in the Windows taskbar, checking ever so often for updates. It's not as powerful as other RSS readers--it's not easy to tell which feeds and articles are new/updated, for instance--but it is rock-solid with no bugs that I've ever found.

Amphetadesk is pretty popular.
If you want to embed RSS in your own home page(or any HTML page) like I have done on http://bhavesh.freeshell.org/news.html then you can use http://zvonnews.sourceforge.net/zfeeder.php

What, like kozmo.com? Delivering movies and snacks was a good idea, in theory...but apparently not a sustainable business model. I knew bad things were coming when they started delivering Rolexes and other rediculously expensive things...

Maybe the real lesson isn't "email bad, rss good", but that RSS has the nice property of allowing the user to select how she would prefer to access the resource in question -- maybe as email, maybe in a custom web page via Amphetadesk, or maybe in a special purpose application such as NetNewsWire. For that matter, maybe they'd like receiving info on a non-traditional device, such as a PDA or video game console, and RSS feeds can be more adaptable than other channels.

Personally, I like email, I've got processes for handling a silly volume of it, and the ability to get RSS feeds I'm interested mailed to me on some kind of schedule appeals to me -- even though the idea hadn't occurred to me before this weekend.

So the next question for me then is, for those of you that like RSS but don't care for email, how would you prefer to access such data? What software are you using today? What problems, if any, do you have with the way your RSS aggregator works? What properties would you like to see in such software tomorrow?

I've found it a great way to keep track of all the RSS feeds out there. It's been stable for a while, but a good /.ing might spur them to add some new features ;)

Here's the home page : amphetadesk

Not that this is on topic by any means, but here is a response.

Of the established solutions for compiling Perl into executables, at the forefront are IndigoStar's Perl2EXE and ActiveState's PerlApp. Both are commercial products. I've not had a reasonable impetus to buy either, but programs like AmphetaDesk, an RSS aggregator written in Perl, make impressive use of Perl2EXE. There may be a point in the future at which I might happily buy it--it just depends on the end I'm trying to meet with a given project. Sometimes preaching the freedom-of-software concept makes us forget that things can be worth money...

There's also perlcc, which comes standard with Perl, but it's in a "very experimental" stage and not recommended for production code.

So, there are options.

Of course, you aren't being a zealot by mentioning the advantages of one language over another. I've enjoyed reading all of the (reasonable) point/counterpoint comparisons between Python and Perl. I personally don't do enough programming in any of the areas where Python surpasses Perl's usefulness to make a serious switch. Perhaps in the future, I will.

What doesn't make sense is one's assumption that because he writes code in one language instead of another he is somehow of a superior race of beings. If there's any measure of superiority to be had, it more appropriately belongs to those who are familiar with (or even those who are willing to learn) more languages and environments and all of the necessary tricks and idioms to write an intelligent solution within any one of them.

But even if this is something that properly defines one's superiority, making a nuisance of oneself screaming about said superiority does an incredible lot to negate it.

Generic segue, an article about the BOFH becoming passé caught my eye today...

You can already search rss feeds on google.

Plus there are tons of news aggregators that already exist and have huge indicies of rss sources.

Conclusion: /. editors get a kick out giving google reason to sue another small company with poor judgement! Either that or they like /.ing small sites.

In other words:

1. Create web site - which doesn't do anything useful but has a name that rips off Google.
2. ???
3. Lawsuit!

I like sites like this ... but isn't their already an effort to define and tie blogging communities via the The Weblog MetaData Initiative?

I mean, Waypath is at one level convenient, but no more so than well established weblog communities such as
blo.gs, the Eaton WebPortal and blogs4God. Moreover, when it comes to gleaning headline news via a blog, I would suspect the real weapon of cohice would be our personal aggregators such as Amphetadesk and HotSheet?

Which is where the WMDI comes in. It helps me identify sites via xml-ish mechanisms such as the Dublin Core Initiative ... which is why I would think someone who's blogging their brains out for the hottest headlines might not be better served by the WMDI.

Then again, your mileage may vary.

• Home Planet, a space exploration tool for Windows
• AmphetaDesk, an open-source cross-platform news aggregrator

Enjoy

Try Amphetadesk for a very portable open-source news aggregator. Works on Windows/Mac/Linux, straightforward installation, easy to use, pretty much all the same features as Aggie. I think you'll like it even more...

[standards compliant Websites working in more user-agents] I wish you were correct on this point. It would be great if modern HTML were 100% backward compatible

Its not the backwards compatability that concerns me, its the _sideways_ compatability that's more important to me. The authored HTML tends to work in a range of Netscape browsers, a range of Internet Explorer browsers, and sometimes in a range of Opera browsers. Anything other than that is random.

A standard's adhering HTML document could be used in all the browsers above, plus all the other user agents out there that support the standard followed. So text-to-speech browsers, indexers, spiders, content aggregators -- all the silent user-agents suddenly have access to structured content.

These are the useragents that are overlooked by the typical public website. People don't tend to notice that structured markup scores a lot better in google than font-flavoured tag soup, precisely because h1 defines a first level header, and font defined some weird presentational style but nothing semantic that a search engine can use.

I don't believe browsers will be the user-agent of choice in the coming years - we'll automate all the manual intensive process of trawling through websites looking for information, and we'll delegate it to some sort of intelligent agents that do the work while we do something more enjoyable.

RSS Aggregators like AmphetaDesk show a very basic inkling of what can be possible with structure and the value of content out there on the Internet.

But we need structured markup to add semantic meaning to the content, and then we can leverage that content into something truely useful. (Yes, I'm a dreamer longing for something practical)

And here's some extraneous text because my comment violates the "postercomment compression filter" without it.

These bankrupt dotcoms
would fade like the morning mist
but for this website


--

You might want to try my site: http://www.newsisfree.com/

If you're tired of MyNetscape, it offers over 1400 news sources you can arrange in boxes as you like.

NewsIsFree also exports most of them many formats such as many RSS flavors (for use with Radio Userland, Headline Viewer or AmphetaDesk, but also JavaScript or HTML easy integration on your web site.

Also, check out this page, for a list of other RSS providers.

You can get a Mousepad from the Museum of E-Failure and look all you want.

While targeted, topical, and intellectual collaborative weblogs can serve as a useful tool in disseminating information and fostering a community, I'm of the opinion that most personal online journals are pointless and/or worthless.

Yes, the majority of my online friends have jumped on this latest fad (establishing online diaries and blogs), but when I peruse them I primarily see just overhyped cookie-cutter angst and cries for sympathy on the diary side, with meaningless mental tidbits coupled with a race to establish the most feel-the-love linkylinks on the blog side.

Thing is, I can't tell if the primary motivation for all these activities is more exhibitionism or narcissism. I have to agree with the above comment by ChuckFlynn when he says online journaling and blogging reinforce self-delusions of grandeur that your trivial day-to-day experiences are somehow relevant or helpful to the world; and the AC who pointed out they're usually 'self-centered unimaginative ramblings' with a limited and egotistical perspective.

What happens to dead's homepage ? Do someone close them ? Or do they stand, like a simulacrum of eternity?

For a while, Afterdeath was formed by volonteers that would maintain pages of dead people. But it seems that the project is also dead.

Then, given the low cost of diskspace and unused bandwidth and the high cost of webmaster attention, probably they join the number of the Ghostsites.
__

1. Write an agent that will collect evidence of prior art to dispute a given patent. Not really a web improvement per se, but it would certainly be a great use of the web.

2. Write an agent that will generate prior art in the public domain. Could potentially also be used to dispute patents as having been "obvious" if it generates the same or similar ideas. And it could be a potential source of inspiration, á la Mirsky's "Open Source Business Plans".

Steve Gilliard has a piece over at Net Slaves, called "Who watches the Guardians." It is about Esther D. and paints an unlovely portrait. I suggest you all read it before your boners get too hard for her.

I, for one, agree with Steve G. She's the last person I want running the ICANN. In fact, I want no one running it, 'cause you can't really trust anyone with that much power. Well, I might trust myself, but you probably wouldn't. :-)

Esther has too much money involved and she's too cozy with Technology CEOs to be trusted with this position. Just read her book, RELEASE 2.0, and you'll read what I'm talking about. It's just filled with all the names of all these companies and CEOs that she's involved in. She's also not a very technical person, and you get that from her book, not just 'casue Steve G. says so.

However, politically... those of us who actually work in the industry rather than own it (realizing that some folks do both), have very little influence. Politically, we are all over the map with a general spirit of libertarian ethics with a distrust of the megacorporation ingrained into our psyche by personal expierence and cyberpunk literature we have been gobbling for the last two decades.

And, if we formed our own party in the single member-district system of the U.S (sorry, I know the rest of the world is more democratic with parlimentary systems) such would be a third party which would never gain any influence outside of local elections in California and the Pacific North West. We also, as workers, don't have the money to buy...er...lobby politicans. Easy example... if you and AOL/Time-Warner lobby congress about MP3s, who do you think is going to win?

No, fellow workers... we get paid so much because we have power. Power, untapped and unrealized. Middle-management was gutted through downsizing and our network connections have given rise to more "just-in-time" capitalism. Our skills , if you believe the Software Labor Shortage Myth are in such short supply that we can not train and import workers fast enough. Imagine if we can collectively come to agreements in which we decide what things we will work for and will not. Not only can we have influence over technology, but a host of other things that need geeks to be accomplished.

Our power is in action, not the ballot box. We can vote with our feet. We can strike (here is the source. We can slack and slow down. We can sick-in. We can boycott. We can Direct Action. We can be as Electornically Civilly Disobedient, and we can be... it works like we did with Low Power FM through an organized political campaign of radio piracy, we were able to sieze part of the spectrum from corporate monoplization for community interests. We can break mass media blackouts of information, by making our own media, like we did in Seattle, and like we'll do again in DC.

Are you tired of 60-hour work weeks? Of corporations making deals with politicans to undermine over-time pay and encourage permatemping? We don't have to be slaves.

Are you tired of technology developing that penalizes both the worker and the consumer, to the benfit of a handful of the rich and power... anybody remember the Java Class War? Where was our class in that? Complaining about how the standards needed to be independent of propietary control, and largely doing nothing about it! We need to take control of training and make it clear that it is those of us work in the industry that can figure out who knows what, rather than some profiteering third party or a way for leading software companies to gouge folks for certification!

We need non-profit employment services (or hiring halls) so we can dump our contracting companies (ie. pimps, job sharks, etc... ) once and for all.

We need to organize, and organize in a way that maintains our autonomy and democratic values. We don't need any union bosses, telling us what we can and can't do... but we do need to be in solidarity with our fellow workers so we can support each other in struggle. Who among you wouldn't strike to help the workers in hardware manufacture to get a better shake? Some more pay, a safer environment, etc... Who among you wouldn't refuse to work, if you knew by refusing for a short time you could bring in ecological sound practices. We can bring on the Viridian revolution, but innovation won't be enough... we have to force the issue and force companies to clean up their mess.

We have to become responsible, or we have noone to blame for how bad work is but ourselves.

Solid,

Flint

Baltimore IWW Telecommunications and Computer Workers IU560

(San Francisco, Toronto)

Also check out: Syndicat de l'Industrie Informatique, Washington Technical Workers Alliance, FACE Intel, Alliance@IBM, BITE Division of NWU (Business - Instructional - Techincal - Electronic).

We Can Win! No Nerds, No Birds!

The Internet Archive is devoted to preserve the information contained in the Internet.
And I have just found an article from Steve Baldwin, the guy from Ghost Sites!
--

Check out Ghost sites...

Your Working Boy,

Precisely *because* there are non of the physical clues of meeting people ftf. I mean, yes, it allows for my assessments of people to be based purely upon their attitudes and personality...but there are times when those things are not enough or are misleading. I'm 23 years old, and for awhile last summer, I found myself in a fairly close friendship on IRC with a person that I discovered was only 14. There wasn't anything untoward going on -- we were just friends -- but it still came as quite a shock. I'm still good friends with this person, and I probably wouldn't be if we'd met elsewhere than online, BUT...I'm sure that if this person's parents found out that a 23 year-old computer geek had ANY sort of relationship with their 14 year-old they would be far from pleased (with none of our protestations of innocence doing any good) -- see the article at Netslaves about online child-molestation...*shudder*. There's a *reason* that we react certain ways to certain people when we meet them ftf -- automatically labelling someone as a kid, for instance -- and many times they're perfectly good reasons. My friend might technically be better off hanging out with persons of the same age group, rather than in predominantly adult trafficked IRC channels. I dunno. Like I said, the connotations are scary.

I was all set to buy the book until I read the . Can anyone who's read the book say whether it's better than the site?

And the URL is... this here