Doug's Inner Net NewsCome to think of it ...Reification of Attention- November 27, 2005 Most of us have never thought of our "attention" as a tangible thing. Advertising executives surely do, though. And so do a group of people led by Steve Gillmor who created a non-profit organization called AttentionTrust.org. According to the thinking of this group, your "attention data" is valuable, and you should have the right to control it. Attention data is the record of your past online activities that indicate where your attention has been. Attention data has predictive power,...http://www.dsauder.com/weblog/archives/000308.html Is Control-S Necessary- November 26, 2005 How many decisions do we make just because everyone has always done it that way You write a desktop application, and you add a File menu, and that File menu has a menu item labeled "Save," and you bind Control-S to that "Save" menu item, right Of course, we've always done it that way! Why Control-S, and "manual save," are so natural, we never stop to think about whether it really makes sense. But if you do stop and think about it, I think you'll agree with me that we really don't...http://www.dsauder.com/weblog/archives/000307.html Oreilly's Open Books- November 17, 2005 O'reilly is a popular publisher among techies, and deservedly so. One of the valuable services O'Reilly provides is the Open Books Project. This project provides books online for free. There are many reasons O'Reilly has made these books free. Some books have outlived their economic viability, meaning that O'Reilly would not recover the expense of another printing. Some books are free because the author(s) negotiated a deal that required that they be free online. Some books are free..http://www.dsauder.com/weblog/archives/000306.html Where Do You Find RFCs in HTML- November 12, 2005 Have you noticed that some RFCs are available in HTML and plain text Every few months, there is a discussion on the IETF general mailing list about the format of RFCs. The result is almost always the same: we'll continue to publish plain text RFCs, but we'll keep an open mind. Well, a few years back, Marshall Rose and friends created a tool named xml2rfc that converts a certain XML format into the standard plain text RFC format. In addition, the tool converts the XML to HTML. (There...http://www.dsauder.com/weblog/archives/000305.html Do You Speak XML Schema- November 8, 2005 XML Schema is commonly used in technical documents, including Internet RFCs, to express the syntax for XML in various documents and protocol messages. It's also the basis for SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. I have felt for a long time that XML schema is ugly and useless. It's ugly because it is so difficult to read. Most published documents, even Word documents, don't publish the XML Schema with syntax highlighting, which would certainly help. But if it's hard to read, at least it's machine...http://www.dsauder.com/weblog/archives/000304.html Who Should Pay Whom- November 4, 2005 It's been around the blogosphere. SBC's CEO Ed Whitacre (pictured) calls the application providers "freeloaders." See, for example, the post at Techdirt. The idea is that the application providers should pay the access providers -- SBC for instance -- for access. But isn't this backwards from the other popular distribution model What about cable TV Imagine Comcast telling Disney that it must pay to use Comcast's cable lines. No, in the cable TV business, the cable company pays the...http://www.dsauder.com/weblog/archives/000303.html |