Chris Lydon Interview
Christopher Lydon's
interview of me
is
up on
his site. Amazing what
he can do
with such a tight budget and in such a short amount of time. I've been
a big fan of his work, so I jumped at the chance when he called me up
and asked for an interview. We did it amazingly quickly - he called me
up, we talked for 30 minutes, and 2 hours later, the interview was
posted to the web. Chris is onto something...
RSS as Infrastructure
With the announcement yesterday of the
assignment
of the
RSS 2.0
specification to
Harvard
University, along with a
Creative Commons
license and a new 3 person steering committee, RSS 2.0 has become
more firmly cemented as an infrastructural element in the web
publishing world. This is a good thing. It will help wary
organizations to feel more comfortable using a syndication standard
with the assurances that it is not going to be changed on a whim or
hijacked by someone with a hidden agenda. RSS 2.0 isn't perfect,
and that's one of its best qualities. It was designed with a "
worse is better"
mentality, what I like to call POGE - the
Principle
of Good Enough. That means it is simple, easy to understand
and to code. It means that it doesn't have a lot of bells and
whistles, and it isn't a format for all things or all purposes.
It has a
history,
which means it has some bumps and warts, but IMHO, it does a pretty
good job of doing what it sets out to do: Be a format for the
syndication of published content.
This is not a knock on
other efforts
that attempt to achieve other goals. My perspective is to use the
best tool for the job at hand, and it is OK for different people to
have different opinions on what that is.
Kudos to
Dave Winer, the folks
at
Berkman, and the
Advisory Board
for taking this positive step.
New Technorati Pinger is active: Hot 'n fresh weblog indexing
Over the past months, I've had a lot of people send me email or leave comments asking how they can get their weblog indexed by
Technorati. This weekend, I had a few hours of free time and I whipped a new feature with two interfaces: It is a standard
XML-RPC ping server (like
www.weblogs.com) that you can add to your weblog software configuration (or that hosting providers can use) that will immediately add your weblog into a special high-priority queue for Technorati's indexing runs. This means faster, more accurate search data.
To use the pinger, there are two interfaces: an XML-RPC interface at
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping which understands the
weblogUpdates.ping and
weblogUpdates.extendedPing specifications detailed in the weblogs.com specification and the blo.gs specification. I don't have a SOAP 1.1 version done yet, but I can add that, if people want it - leave a comment below.
If you're using a modern weblog package like
Moveable Type,
blosxom,
pMachine or many others, simply add
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping to your notifications configuration.
The other way of notifying Technorati that you've updated your weblog is the web interface available at
http://www.technorati.com/ping.html Simply fill in your weblog name and its URL and voila, your weblog will be added into the fast indexing queue. Once you've done it, you can even bookmark the page so that you can easily notify Technorati whenever you update or add items to your blog.
Of course, if you're currently notifying www.weblogs.com,
www.blo.gs, or
www.blogrolling.com when your weblog is updated, your weblog will continue to make its way into the Technorati index, albeit a bit more slowly. Notifying Technorati directly will put your weblog (or weblog hosting site) onto a higher priority track to get included in the index.
These two features are new, so there might be some downtime or fixes during the next few days if I need to fix a bug or two, but the interface and the ping URLs are set in stone, so if you are a blogging tool author you don't need to worry that the service will move to a different location, or that the API will change.
A new
wiki page describes how to add the ping service to your favorite weblogging tool's configuration.
As always,
feedback is appreciated.