I had promised myself I wouldn't get involved in this debate but it seems every day I see more and more people giving credence to bad ideas and misconceptions. The debate I am talking about is one click subscriptions to RSS feeds which Dave Winer recently called the Yahoo! problem. Specifically Dave Winer wrote

Yahoo sends emails to bloggers with RSS feeds saying, hey if you put this icon on your weblog you'll get more subscribers. It's true you will. Then Feedster says the same thing, and Bloglines, etc etc. Hey I did it too, back when Radio was pretty much the only show in town, you can see the icon to the right, if you click on it, it tries to open a page on your machine so you can subscribe to it. I could probably take the icon down by now, most Radio users probably are subscribed to Scripting News, since it is one of the defaults. But it's there for old time sake, for now.

Anyway, all those logos, when will it end? I can't imagine that Microsoft is far behind, and then someday soon CNN is going to figure out that they can have their own branded aggregator for their own users (call me if you want my help, I have some ideas about this) and then MSNBC will follow, and Fox, etc. Sheez even Best Buy and Circuit City will probably have a "Click here to subscribe to this in our aggregator" button before too long.

That's the problem.

Currently I have four such one click subscription buttons on my homepage;  , , , and . Personally, I don't see this as a problem since I expect market forces and common sense to come into play here. But let's see what Dave Winer proposes as a solution.

Ask the leading vendors, for example, Bloglines, Yahoo, FeedDemon, Google, Microsoft, and publishers, AP, CNN, Reuters, NY Times, Boing Boing, etc to contribute financially to the project, and to agree to participate once it's up and running.
...
Hire Bryan Bell to design a really cool icon that says "Click here to subscribe to this site" without any brand names. The icon is linked to a server that has a confirmation dialog, adds a link to the user's OPML file, which is then available to the aggregator he or she uses. No trick here, the technology is tried and true. We did it in 2003 with feeds.scripting.com.

This 'solution' to the 'problem' boggled my bind. So every time someone wants to subscribe to an RSS feed it should go through a centralized server? The privacy implications of this alone are significant let alone the creation of a central point of failure. In fact Dave Winer recently posted a link that highlights a problem with centralized services related to RSS.

Besides my issues with the 'solution' I have quite a few problems with the so-called 'Yahoo problem' as defined. The first problem is that it only affects web based aggregators that don't have a client application installed on the user's desktop. Desktop aggregators already have a de facto one-click subscription mechanism via the feed URI scheme which is supported by at least a dozen of the most popular aggregators across multiple platforms including the next version of Apple's web browser Safari. Recently both Brent Simmons (in his post feed: protocol) and Nick Bradbury (in his post Really Simple Subscription) reiterated this fact. In fact, all four services whose buttons I have on my personal blog can utilize the feed URI scheme as a subscription mechanism since all four services have desktop applications they can piggyback this functionality onto. Yahoo and MSN have toolbars, Newsgator has their desktop aggregator and Bloglines has its notifier.  

The second problem I have with this is that it aims to stifle an expression of competition in the market place. If the Yahoo! aggregator becomes popular enough that every website puts a button for it beside a link to their RSS feed then they deserve kudos for spreading their reach since it is unlikely that this would happen without some value being provided by their service. I don't think Yahoo! should be attacked for their success nor should their success be termed some sort of 'problem' for the RSS world to fix.

As I mentioned earlier in my post I was going to ignore this re-re-reiteration of the one click subscription debate until I saw rational folks like Tim Bray in his post One-Click subscription  actually discussing the centralized RSS subscription repository idea without giving it the incredulity it deserves. Of course, I also see some upturned eyebrows at this proposal from folks like Bill de hÓra in his post A registry for one click subscription, anyone?

Coincidentally just as I finished reading a post by Tim Bray about Private Syndication, I got two bug reports filed almost simultaneously about RSS Bandit's support for secure RSS feeds. The first was SSL challenge for non-root certs where the user complained that instead of prompting the user when there is a problem with an SSL certificate like browsers do we simply fail. One could argue that this is the right thing to do especially when you have folks like Tim Bray suggesting that bank transactions and medical records should be flowing through RSS. However given the precedent set by web browsers we'll probably be changing our behavior. The second bug was that RSS Bandit doesn't support cookies. Many services use cookies to track authenticated users as well as provide individual views tailored to a user. Although there are a number of folks who tend to consider cookies a privacy issue, most popular websites use them and they are mostly harmless. I'll likely fix this bug in the next couple of weeks.  

These bug reports in combination with a couple more issues I've had to deal with while writing  code to process RSS feeds in RSS Bandit has givn me my inspiration for my next Extreme XML column. I suspect there's a lot of mileage that can be obtained from an article that dives deep into the various issues one deals with while processing XML on the Web (DTDs, proxies, cookies, SSL, unexpected markup, etc) which uses RSS as the concrete example. Any of the readers of my column care to comment on whether they'd like to see such an article and if so what they'd want to see covered?

Mike has a post entitled 5 Things I Dislike About MSN Spaces where he lists the top 5 issues he has with the service. 

Five things I dislike about MSN Spaces:

1. I can't use BlogJet to post to my blog today.  Not a huge deal, but I love this little tool.  Web browsers (Firefox included!) just don't do it for me in the way of text editing.

2. We don't have enough themes, which means there isn't enough differentiation between spaces.  People come in a lot of flavors.

3. We don't have comments on anything other than blog entries, which means a lot of people are using comments to either a) comment on photos, or b) comment on the space itself.

4. The Statistics page doesn't roll-up RSS aggregator "hits", only web page-views.  I want to know who is reading this post in various aggregators.

5. The recent blog entry on the MSN Messenger 7.0 beta contact card doesn't show enough information to compel me to visit the user's space.  

since I'm the eternal copycat I also decided to put together a top 5 list of issues I'd like to see fixed in the service. Some of them I am in the process of fixing and some I'm still nagging folks like Mike to fix since they are UI issues and have nothing to do with my areas of responsibility. Here's my list

Five things I'd like to see fixed in MSN Spaces:

1. I can't post to my blog using standard weblog tools such as the BlogJet, w.bloggar or Flickr. I now have 3 blogs and I'd love to author my posts in one place then have it automatically posted to all three of them. My MSN Spaces blog prevents this from happening today.

2. The text control for posting to your blog should support editing raw HTML and support a WYSIWYG editting. I find it stunning that open source projects like dasBlog & Community Server::Blogs have a more full featured edit control for posting to ones blog than a MSN Spaces.

3. The user experience around managing and interacting with my blogroll is subpar. I'd love to be able to upload my aggregator subscription list as an OPML file to my MSN Space blog roll. While we're at it, it would be cool to render MSN Spaces blogs differently in my blog roll and links in my posts perhaps with a pawn such as what LiveJournal does with  which links to a user's profile.

4. I want to be able to upload music lists from other play lists formats besides Windows media player. I have a bunch of playlists in WinAmp and iTunes which I want to upload to my MSN Space but don't have the patience to transcribe. It is cool that we allow uploading Windows Media Player playlists but what about iTunes and WinAmp?

5. I need more ways to find other MSN Spaces that I might be interested in. The recently updated spaces and newly created spaces widgets on the MSN Spaces homepage aren't cutting it for me. In additon, once that is fixed it would also be cool if it was made really simple to subscribe to interesting MSN Spaces in my RSS aggregator of choice using a one-click subscription mechanism.

I've been doing a bit of reading about folksonomies recently. The definition of folksonomy in Wikipedia currently reads

Folksonomy is a neologism for a practice of collaborative categorization using simple tags in a flat namespace. This feature has begun appearing in a variety of social software. At present, the best examples of online folksonomies are social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, a bookmark sharing site, Flickr, for photo sharing, and 43 Things, for goal sharing.

What I've found interesting about current implementations of folksonomies is that they are   blogging with content other than straight text. del.icio.us is basically a linkblog and Flickr isn't much different from a photoblog/moblog. The innovation in these sites is in merging the category metadata from the different entries such that users can browse all the links or photos which match a specified keyword. For example, here are recent links added del.icio.us with the tag 'chicken' and recent photos added to Flickr with the tag 'chicken'. Both sites not only allow browsing all entries that match a particular tag but also go as far as alowing one to subscribe to particular tags as an RSS feed.

I've watched with growing bemusement as certain people have started to debate whether folksonomies will replace traditional categorization mechanisms. Posts such as The Innovator's Lemma  by Clay Shirky, Put the social back into social tagging by David Weinberger and it's the social network, stupid! by Liz Lawley go back and forth about this very issue. This discussion reminds me of the article Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You by Joel Spolsky where he wrote

A recent example illustrates this. Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.

All they'll talk about is peer-to-peer this, that, and the other thing. Suddenly you have peer-to-peer conferences, peer-to-peer venture capital funds, and even peer-to-peer backlash with the imbecile business journalists dripping with glee as they copy each other's stories: "Peer To Peer: Dead!"

I think Clay is jumping several steps ahead to conclude that explicit classification schemes will give way to categorization by users. The one thing people are ignoring in this debate (as in all technical debates) is that the various implementations of folksonomies are popular because of the value they provide to the user. When all is said and done, del.icio.us is basically a linkblog and Flickr isn't much different from a photoblog/moblog. This provides inherent value to the user and as a side effect [from the users perspective] each new post becomes part of an ecosystem of posts on the same topic which can then be browsed by others. It isn't clear to me that this dynamic exists everywhere else explicit classification schemes are used today.

One thing that is clear to me is that personal publishing via RSS and the various forms of blogging have found a way to trample all the arguments against metadata in Cory Doctorow's Metacrap article from so many years ago. Once there is incentive for the metadata to be accurate and it is cheap to create there is no reason why some of the scenarios that were decried as utopian by Cory Doctorow in his article can't come to pass. So far only personal publishing has provided the value to end users to make both requirements (accurate & cheap to create) come true.

Postscript: Coincidentally I just noticed a post entitled Meet the new tag soup  by Phil Ringnalda pointing out that emphasizing end-user value is needed to woo people to create accurate metadata in the case of using semantic markup in HTML. So far most of the arguments I've seen for semantic markup [or even XHTML for that matter] have been academic. It would be interesting to see what actual value to end users is possible with semantic markup or whether it really has been pointless geekery as I've suspected all along. 

My article on Cω is finally published. It appeared on XML.com as Introducing Comega while it showed up as the next installment of my Extreme XML column on MSDN with the title An Overview of Cω: Integrating XML into Popular Programming Languages. It was also mentioned on Slashdot in the story Microsoft Research's C-Omega. 

I'll be following this with an overview of ECMAScript for XML (E4X) in a couple of months.

If you've been following the blogosphere you should know by now that the Google, Yahoo! and MSN search engines decided to start honoring the rel="nofollow" attribute on links to mean that the linked page shouldn't get any increased ranking from that link. This is intended to reduce the incentive for comment spammers who've been flooding weblogs with links to their websites in comment fields. There is another side effect of the existence of this element which is pointed out by Shelley Powers in her post The Other Shoe on Nofollow where she writes

I expected this reason to use nofollow would take a few weeks at least, but not the first day. Scoble is happy about the other reason for nofollow: being able to link to something in your writing and not give ‘google juice’ to the linked.

Now, he says, I can link to something I dislike and use the power of my link in order to punish the linked, but it won’t push them into a higher search result status.

Dave Winer started this, in a way. He would give sly hints about what people have said and done, leaving you knowing that an interesting conversation was going on elsewhere, but you’re only hearing one side of it. When you’d ask him for a link so you could see other viewpoints, he would reply that "…he didn’t want to give the other party Google juice." Now I imagine that *he’ll link with impunity–other than the fact that Technorati and Blogdex still follow the links. For now, of course. I imagine within a week, Technorati will stop counting links with nofollow implemented. Blogdex will soon follow, I’m sure.

Is this so bad? In a way, yes it is. It’s an abuse of the purpose of the tag, which was agreed on to discourage comment spammers. More than that, though, it’s an abuse of the the core nature of this environment, where our criticism of another party, such as a weblogger, came with the price of a link. Now, even that price is gone.

I don't see this is an abuse of the tag, I see it as fixing a bug in Google's PageRank algorithm. It's always seemed broken to me that Google assumes that any link to a source is meant to convey that the target is authoritative. Many times people link to websites they don't consider authoritative for the topic they are discussing. This notion of 'the price of a link' has been based on a design flaw in Google's PageRank algorithm. Social norms should direct social behavior not bugs in software.

A post entitled Nofollow Sucks on the Aimless Words blog has the following statement

Consider what the wholesale implementation of this new web standard means within the blogosphere. "nofollow" is English for NO FOLLOW and common sense dictates that when spider finds this tag it will not follow the subsequent link.

The author of the blog post later retracts his statements but it does bring up an interesting point. Robert Scoble highlights the fact that it didn't take a standards committee to come up with this just backchannel conversations that took a few hours. However as Tim Ewald recently wrote in his post "Make it easy for people to pay you"

The value of the standardization process is that it digs issues - architectural, security, reliability, scalability, etc. - and addresses them. It also makes the language more tighter and less vague

The Aimless Words weblog points out that it is unclear to anyone who isn't party to whatever conversations that went on between Google, MSN, Yahoo and others what exactly are the semantics of rel='nofollow' on a link. Given that it is highly unlikely that all three search engines even use the same ranking algorithms I'm not even sure what it means for them to say the link doesn't contribute to the ranking of the site. Will the penalty that Yahoo search applies to such sites be the same in Google and MSN search? Some sort of spec or spec text would be nice to see instead of 'trust us' which seems to be what is emanating from all the parties involved at the current time.

PS: I was wondering why I never saw the posts about this on the Google blog  in RSS Bandit and it turned out to be because the Google Blog atom feeds are malformed XML. Hopefully they'll fix this soon.

The New Yorker has an article by Seymour Hersh entitled THE COMING WARS: What the Pentagon can now do in secret where he discusses alleged plans the US administration has for invading Iran in the near term. To article is scary reading but the part that had me the most stunned is the following excerpt

In my interviews over the past two months, I was given a much harsher view. The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become clear that the Europeans’ negotiated approach cannot succeed, and that at that time the Administration will act. "We’re not dealing with a set of National Security Council option papers here," the former high-level intelligence official told me. "They’ve already passed that wicket. It’s not if we’re going to do anything against Iran. They’re doing it."

The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran’s ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. "Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement," the consultant told me. "The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse"—like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.

"The idea that an American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would produce a popular uprising is extremely illinformed," said Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar who worked on the National Security Council in the Bush Administration. "You have to understand that the nuclear ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum, and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on their ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern nation that’s technologically sophisticated." Leverett, who is now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the Brookings Institution, warned that an American attack, if it takes place, "will produce an Iranian backlash against the United States and a rallying around the regime."

This sounds suspiciously like the same reasoning that claimed that Iraqis would welcome the US led invasion with open arms. I know the saying "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" is a cliché but this is getting ridiculous. Maybe someone should get these folks a copy of DJ Green Lantern's Shade 45: Sirius Bizness mixtape and put on track 10 where Immortal Technique opens up the second verse with

They say the rebels in Iraq still fight for Saddam,
But that's bullshit i'll show you why it's totally wrong,
Cuz if another country invaded the hood tonight,
It'd be warfare through Harlem and Washington Heights
I wouldn't be fightin' for Bush or white americas dream,
I'd be fightin' for my peoples survival and self esteem,
I wouldn't fight for racist churches from the south my nigga,
I'd be fightin' to be keep the occupation out my nigga,

It doesn't take an expert in Middle East history with a Ph.D to figure this stuff out. The continual waste of life and resources going on in the Middle East due the Bush administrations misadventures completely turns my stomach.

After several months of waiting for The Game's new album, The Documentary is finally out. I knew subscribing to Amazon's RSS feeds would come in handy.

G-G-G-G-G-Unit!!!

It had to happen sooner or later. MyMSN now supports adding RSS or Atom 0.3 feeds as content sources for your home page. RSS/Atom content modules can be customized to show articles from up to 1 day old to up to 365 days old, display from up to 1 article to up to 30 articles and either show article summaries as a tool tip or inline following the article headline. 

Below are screenshots of me testdriving the new features

1. MyMSN homepage with option to add RSS feeds as content modules
2. Adding Jeremy Zawodny's Atom feed to my MyMSN homepage
3. Jeremy Zawodny's Atom feed and Robert Scoble's RSS feed as part of my homepage

In addition the MyMSN folks also provide a handy way to create a link that enables people to add a feed to their MyMSN front page. The following link will add my RSS feed to your MyMSN front page

http://my.msn.com/addtomymsn.armx?id=rss&ut=http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss&ru=http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog

Just as with other Web based aggregators there is also a handy button one can add to a website to enable one-click subscription to your RSS feed. This brings to a grand total of four buttons I need to add to my homepage; , , , and .

There is also an MSN RSS Directory that contains links to the RSS feeds produced by MSN properties such as MSNBC, MSN Autos and MSN Music.  

I'm really glad to see this ship. When I was first hired onto MSN I was supposed to work with the MyMSN folks on this effort but eventually things changed. Even though I haven't been directly responsible for this feature I've been in touch with the folks driving it and I think it is totally killer that Microsoft has finally officially cast a stone in the XML syndication waters.

Great work all around.