Status-Q

Thanks to Brian Groce's email notification plugin for WordPress, you can now ask to be notified by email whenever there's a new Status-Q post. Just fill in the little box on the bottom-right. All email addresses will, of course, be kept completely confidential.

Ron Avitzur's story of how he kept working at Apple when he was no longer working for Apple. [Thanks to Seb Wills for the link]

This article by Scott Berkun is a splendid discussion of things that have been done and that could be done to improve web browsers. I found the link on John's blog, and, like John, I'm more of an enthusiast for RSS feeds than Scott is. But I have often wondered why.

Scott is right in pointing out that RSS has many similarities with push technologies such as Pointcast, and Netscape's 'channels', and other flotsam & jetsam in the internet bubble. It's an amazingly crude technology - inferior in many ways to good old Usenet news, for example, which I've hardly read for years... why is that?

Well, as Robert points out, the rise of RSS is completely dependent on the rise of the 'blog. And the rise of the blog comes from the fact that the best way to handle information overload is to use humans, not machines, to filter it. Similarly, Google used the human decisions involved in the creation of web pages to build a more useful search engine. For a long time we've decided what news we read by relying on newspaper journalists and editors we trust, and what music to listen to by picking a radio station & DJs with similar tastes to our own. Bloggers do just the same for us with web pages. But bloggers aren't as regular in their habits as radio programmes or newspaper front pages, so we need a way to find out when they've written something. Hence RSS.

The older 'push' technologies such as Pointcast were impersonal. You were signing up to read whatever a faceless organisation decided was appropriate to throw at you.

Usenet news still exists, of course, though many people now think of it as 'Google Groups', and it's still useful. But there, your decision is to read whatever anybody has to say on a particular subject. Some of it may be useful. A lot of it, often the majority of it, won't. And we humans would, in general, rather find a person, or a group of people, that we trust, and listen to their opinions, even when they're off-topic. In fact, a lot of the value of a newspaper, or a blog, is the things you learn about that you wouldn't have gone looking for, just because they are off-topic.

It's essentially the human element, the ability to exercise your choice to say to an individual, 'yes, I'm interested in what you have to say', that has made Blogs and RSS succeed where earlier systems have fallen by the wayside.

Going to have a quick play with Sente. There are a couple of bibliographic programs on the Mac which are challenging the very long-lasting but very pricey (and reputedly rather buggy) EndNote. I've seen good reviews for both Bookends and Sente, but the latter got their advertising right:

"It's like iTunes for academic literature"

Well, how could I resist...?

There was some discussion on Mac OS X hints in recent months on how to export your Apple Address Book as comma-separated values for importing into things like Thunderbird.

I did some tweaks to Sean's AddressBookToCSV script, and have since tweaked it a bit more. You can grab my current version here: AB2CSV.zip

I've written before about one of my favourite features of Apple Mail - the ability to select multiple mailboxes at once and see a merged list of messages which you can sort, search etc. If I'm looking for all my correspondence on a particular subject or with a particular person, I'll often select all my (6) inboxes, sent mail boxes, and probably a few archives as well, and then type into the search box. I've never seen this merging of mailboxes work so well on another mail viewer; it's the main thing I miss when using the otherwise excellent Thunderbird.

Once you're working within some search query or other particular view of your mail, though, how do you get back to your normal view to make a quick check on something else without losing your current setup? It's easy, I've just realised. On the File menu there's a 'New Viewer Window' option. This gives you a duplicate of the main window in which you can work completely independently, so you can pop up a new window for a particular search, have separate windows for working in different email accounts etc.

Mac users in the UK should like this; a plug-in for Address Book that lets you pop up a map of the location using Streetmap. Much nicer, in general, than the MapQuest ones, I think.

And, while we're on linguistic topics, how about some Clerihews?

"Seen as part of a Toys-R-Us advertisement in the Daily Telegraph in Nov 2004: 'Pictures are for illustrative purposes only.' You don't say ..."

From Michael Quinion's wonderful World Wide Words site, which I've written about before. Well-worth browsing, or try the Surprise me! link.

S5 is 'A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System'. It uses a single HTML file to create the content for Powerpoint-type slides, and CSS & Javascript to draw them. Not highly sophisticated, but very bandwidth-efficient, and all you need is a browser. Try looking at the sample slideshow and doing 'View Source'.

Perhaps the nicest examples of what CSS formatting can do, though, are to be found at CSS Zen Garden, a whole host of web pages which all use the same HTML but are formatted with different CSS stylesheets to get very different looks.