Don Park is working on a newspaper UI for RSS feeds.

While this is a powerful interface in terms of familiarity and makes an excellent metaphor in terms of gathering news from a global source, perhaps it’s too stylised.

Newspapers cram a lot of information (most of which is filler) into a very small space. The amount of actual amount of raw wanted content by any given reader is minimal (put your hand up if you only read the cartoon strips). The same can’t be said of custom RSS feed generated newspapers. People would only choose to include the content they wanted, so the crowded “interface” becomes slightly redundant.

What might be better is to generate custom web pages based on user templates. I’d rather read content in a web interface that I’ve tweaked for myself than in a automatically generated paper. I know that I’m probably in the minority on that point though, being a web designer does that, but given a reasonable bunch of pre-built templates I can see more users wanting to do this.

Besides, newspaper type-setting (and layout)is an enormously difficult job. People get paid huge sums of money to do it and I don’t think anyone could create an RSS aggregator front-end sophisticated enough to replicate the effect.

But please, Don, prove me wrong. I’d love to see it anyway.

While I’m on the subject, my current RSS aggregator is the wonderful NNTPRSS which hooks into newsgroup readers. This might not be the best interface for normal web users, but for people who are constantly on usenet then it’s fantastic.

Original article Via Stuart Langridge

One of the best ideas I’ve seen implemented in a long time: take the GeoURL tags and the update list from weblogs.com, roll them together in a beautiful flash map, and watch the world update their sites in real-time. This is the world as a blog.

Since I ping weblogs.com and have geoURL tags, I’m going to sit watching the map for the next few minutes waiting for me to appear.

Apparently, I’ve been using acronyms and abbreviations incorrectly, according to Accessify’s guide to using acronyms and abbreviations. Before now, I’ve been using acronyms for everything (thinking abbreviations were for thinks like abbr.

Met up with an old friend for lunch today. He’s been away training for the army. Apparently, they’re quite sadistic about punishing people: “Everyone, 20 push-ups! Lipowski’s got his hand on his hip!”. Fun.

I haven’t really been sleeping well for the last 3 weeks. It’s really starting to get to me. Everything is getting harder to remember, details are harder to retain, more difficult to keep thought strands separate, damn near impossible to write anything decent here, emotions are more easily set off. Basically, the works. So if I’m asshole to you or anyone else, I apologise in advance.

And I’ll end with a joke: What’s big, grey and can’t climb trees?
A car park.

In addition to menus that don’t work as well as they should, I would suggest that Macs have one more fatal flaw in terms of ease of use; although this is one that every Mac user will claim is a feature, rather than a bug.

One-button mice, oh how I hate you. Now, I understand the thinking behind only having one button: consistency. No matter where you are on the screen or what you’re doing, clicking will “activate” the object or menu you’re on. Very nice and simple.

The problem is that I like my right-mouse button; context-sensitivity is very helpful. It works in a generally consistent way. I can largely predict what options I’ll have quick access to from my mouse when I use it. If a program is unpredictable, then it’s the programs fault, not the hardware. This is also a very rare case these days. I can’t remember the last time I was surprised when a right-click didn’t do exactly what I expected it to do. I have, however, been very annoyed by websites which disable my ability to right-click, and by operating systems which assume that I’m too dumb to be able to remember a simple menu system.

As long as alternatives remain in menus, then how does offering a second mouse button hinder anyone? Not offering it is hindering at least one person.

After the recent fighting between Dave Winer and a few others over CSS, Mark Pilgrim has created the Winer Number.

In an effort to spread around this joyous new number to those who have a FOAF profile, I’ve created the Winer Number And Extended Winer Number namespace document.

My own FOAF file has been updated accordingly.