By an odd coincidence today is the first day I looked at the Michael Fagan article on Wikipedia… and apparently several hours ago someone added me to it. Checking the user’s IP address through IP2Location lets me know the user is in Toronto. So confess, who was it… Matt?
Also today my dad sends me photos on Flickr of me, from tuesday, that I didn’t know about 😉
The Elements of Meaningful XHTML – excellent presentation by Tantek. Which I suppose is why I didn’t see him at Tag Tuesday.
IEBlog : Hello from LA! – placeholder until tomorrow when I comment on this
Google Hurricane Katrina Resources – anyone want to explain to me why rel="nofollow" is used on those links?
Tomorrow is my first day interning at A9.com. Got back to California Friday and now have a vague general idea of the layout of Menlo Park and Palo Alto. I don’t really know yet what I’ll be working on there.
Also I’m finally launching UWhub, a search engine for content related to my university. I’ve worked on it for quite a while. Not really much in the last few days, but the “launch” is to coincide with the start of classes. Most people reading this won’t have any use for it, but I intend to generalize it later for searching any collection of sites. I’m sure I’ll have lots of time to work on that, what with the new job 😉
Kiko Calendar Beta – well, it’s definitely beta, but when they add a couple of things, it may just be the app I’ve been hoping someone would make for quite a long time now. we’ll see…
News from Luigi about RSS search from MSN leads me to think MSN Search knows what they’re doing. Or not.
They are putting RSS/Atom search integrated right in with their web search. This is good. But… they’re displaying RSS feeds as regular search results, without modification. That means that when you click on a RSS feed result, you are taken to (surprise) the RSS feed, which, most of the time, is not in a human-readable format. Hello usability? This is acceptable for a major engine to put out for average web users?? Additionally, the ‘cache’ link for RSS feed results displays a somewhat more human-readable display, but it could definitely be improved.
Virtually all, if not all RSS feeds today are representations of existing web pages. It would make a little more sense to point to those, and provide an additional link to the actual RSS feed. This is essentially what all the major RSS search engines are smart enough to do, including Feedster, Blogdigger, and Bloglines.
Actually those engines are all smarter still, since they’re indexing individual RSS items rather than whole RSS feeds as if they were a single document. That’s a huge benefit of RSS; that the individual items have been separated, and usually come with important metadata, like the date. MSN doesn’t seem to make use of this at all, although admittedly their implementation is new.
It does appear that Yahoo has got some of this right, linking to web pages (and sometimes the web pages of the individual items). However, the same does not apply to their search API, which does use RSS feed URLs as the main link for each search result, and it does not provide the web page alternative. Which leads me to the news today of Yahoo Weather in RSS. They’re even including some excellent data in there, but, they’ve defined a new namespace for some of this data, which points to http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/ns/rss/1.0, which returns a 404 now. Also it’d be nice if they labeled their namespace ‘weather,’ rather than ‘yweather.’ And I strongly suspect that there are existing weather vocabularies they may have been able to use instead.
Anyway, back to MSN Search, they’ve introduced two new syntaxes, feed:, to specify to look for RSS feeds, and hasfeed: to specify that the results are web pages that have RSS feeds. That seems okay, but the way to use the syntax is odd. For example feed: site:bbc.co.uk. It has been semi-standard for a while to use syntax like syntax:foo, as in the site: keyword used, however the new syntax seems to be syntax: by itself. Confusing. Let’s just assume that this is temporary, until there’s a web-based interface for choosing to find RSS feeds.
</rant>
Search Interface Protocols and Specifications – I haven’t actually read this (yet) but I’ve been thinking along these lines lately. To add to the list of protocols/specifications discussed, I would also mention Sherlock and Mycroft, the format used for Dave’s Quick Search Deskbar (examples), “quick searches” such as those used in Mozilla products and the virtually identical method used for the Google Deskbar, and the Yahoo! Search Web Services. And I’m sure there are others that I’m not aware of or can’t think of right now. Via Lorcan Dempsey.
I’m leaving tomorrow morning for Seattle and returning back to Waterloo Friday night. I can’t think of anyone I know online who lives there, but if I’m mistaken let me know and I’ll see if we can meet up.
Should be fun, it’s my first time there. I’ll probably take quite a few photos 😉
Marc’s Voice: The GoingOn Network – what a coup for Marc. this may just be the first DLA (or social networking service) I actually use or recommend.