NetNewsWire
I get really annoying when I find a new toy. I tell every person I know about it, I construct my day around it, and every answer to every question passes through the new toy neuron in my head. This means if you ask me, "Hey Rands, what's 7 + 3?" I first think, "How can the new toy help me answer this?" before I say, "10".
The toy (which is not a toy) is NetNewsWire. This product has allowed me to not only change the way I gather information on the Net, but it's also given me the ability to digest much, much more information. To understand the complete holy shit here, we first need some background.
Long ago, I read a lot of Usenet news, but over the years, the signal to noise ration grew intolerable. I know there was good content to be had, but I didn't want to sift through crap to find the rare gems. Yes, you could use kill files to filter out the crap, but suddenly you're spending more on your kill files than reading actually content.
Enter Weblogs. The problem of high quality content is solved by a trustworthy individual finding and sifting through the web to find content they care enough about to post. Content is centralized and filtered by a person.
It works like this for me. I search for information on Google, say, "Safari change log" which invariably, points me at a weblog. Finding the data on the weblog useful, I bookmark the site thinking, "Well, if she/he had that data surely they'll write/find something else relevant". So, I bookmark the site, but what I'm really bookmarking is the person because what I care about is not the content on their site, I care about how the person sifts through fact, fiction, and opinion and weblogs it. The person has credibility, not the website.
The next step is monitoring these weblogs. Occasionally, I crawl through my bookmarks looking for changes. Two problems with this process: first, I'm a data freshness nut case. I want to know as soon as humanly possible when something goes down and bookmark surfing is pull technology which means I only hear about when I happen to stumble on the weblog. I want push because I want to know and I'm on the Net ALL THE TIME.
The second problem is the time it takes to go to a site and figure out if there is new content. I can keep track of ten or twenty sites in my head, but more than that and I start wondering, "Did I already check this site?" Suddenly, I'm limiting the amount I can digest because my memory blows. This is an additional violation my data freshness ethic.
NetNewsWire gives me a terribly sexy data consumption rate by giving me great tools to manage my credibility networks. Wondering what a credibility network is? You can probably guess, but I'll explain in my next column.
NetNewsWire does two things amazing well, first, it reads RSS feeds. I'm not going to explain RSS here, but I will point you at this. The good news is that most weblogs I care about sport an RSS feed. When I asked Emma why her site didn't, she claimed, "I think weblogs are about the content and the presentation" and she's right... they are. They're also published with the intent that it's reasonably easy to discover and read them.
While I appreciate the huge amount of work that goes into sites, I'd argue that without an RSS feed, the individual weblog has less of a chance of being discovered, let alone read because more people can read RSS-based sites than crawl their bookmark files (keep reading re: scalability). Besides, it's just a matter of time before NetNewsWire embeds a browser to gracefully display weblog content in it's fully HTML rendered glory thus making this concern irrelevant to both Emma as well big media types who avoid RSS because of a few of lowering click-thru rates.
The other rock star feature of NetNewsWire is its scalability. I discovered this in two distinct phases. Phase #1 we'll call, "What's the RSS-thing all about anyway?" This was when I downloaded the application and subscribed to ten of my favorite weblogs. Now, whenever I schedule it, NetNewsWire pings all the weblogs, finds new articles, and flags them, Depending on the RSS feed, additional sortable data shows up in the table at the top as well as an excerpt or the article in the detail view.
The side effect of a successful Phase #1 is Phase #2, "Scale, Scale, Scale". As soon I got in the zone with 20+ feeds, I find more weblogs I want to read and I start adding them to my list because my credibility network is growing. The list grows longer and suddenly fills the entire list. Wait, I don't want to start scrolling, so what do I do? Groups. Using the collapsible tree control, NetNewsWire allows you to group sites and then does a spectacular job of rolling all the new content contained in ALL the sites to the top level. This means that for every group, I only see the content that is hot and juicy. Are you drooling, yet? You should be.
NetNewsWire has painlessly scaled to handle hundreds of weblogs for me. This means I'm scanning the fact/fiction/opinion of hundreds of people every minute of every day. I challenged anyone who is currently bookmarked or tabbed based to efficiently read hundreds of weblogs in the time it takes to drink your coffee. If your answer is, "I don't care about hundreds of weblogs", I would suggest you are a state of technical denial where your tool (i.e.: a browser) has limited your vision. Think about it like this, if you were lucky enough to find ten weblogs that you like isn't it possible there are, at least, another ten and wouldn't it great if there were a whole lot more?
Other random NetNewsWire comments:
1. The application is stunning because it's on a Mac, but, well, it's on a Mac which inherently limits its popularity to 5% of the PC market. Fortunately, for NetNewsWire, many of the popular webloggers appears to Apple fanatics. This bodes well for NetNewsWire. [Sidebar: Would it be ironic if the technology which toppled the Microsoft monopoly was information packaged in weblogs?]
2. I have many machines and they're not all Macs which means I'm currently out of luck when I'm sitting at a machine which a) isn't a Mac or b) isn't my primary machine with my NetNewsWire preferences. This likely to lead to web-based RSS-readers since it'd be really handy to be able to surf my news independent of what computer I happen to be on. [Sidebar: I'm distinctly unwilling to part with the Cocoa smoothness of NetNewsWire]
3. NetNewsWire comes in two flavors a Lite and (presumably for pay) Pro version. The Lite version is simply the RSS browser while the Pro version includes a weblog publishing tool as well as a notepad-like outliner. Considering Ranchero is currently a one man effort, this seems like a lot to bite off especially since I'd be more than willing to part with twenty ducks for the Lite version.
Monday, January 20, 2003 @ 8:38PM | permalink
NFL Playoffs
The NFL playoffs have me thinking about gambling. Unfortunately, I’m traveling to Seattle for the Suporbowl. Plus, most of the circle of friends are married now which decreases the chance of a bachelor trip to Vegas. This means I’ll have to read the Rands Vegas System and wait until the yearly August Vegas trip.
Also, go Bucs.
Sunday, January 19, 2003 @ 8:49AM | permalink
17" PowerBook Backlash
There has been a small buzz anti-buzz building against the 17" with the folks I hang out with they're commenting on the fact that "it's WAY too big?", "the 15" inch is the sweet spot", or "it's going to bend'n'twist".
Every single one of these people are a) full of crap, b) totally wrong, and c) secretly in love with the hardware.
While it may not merit a holy shit moment, you simply MUST put the 17" in your lap and try it to have any sort of opinion. At a slow moment at MacWorld, I had a solid 10 mintes with the machine and I'm happy to report that it's pure sex.
First, the case is solid. More solid then my 800Mhz TiBook. Second, as has been reported, the hinge is similar to the iBook, but you won't fully know this until you open one up yourself. Third, they've updated the texture of both the keyboard and trackpad. It's got a pleasant light graininess to it. Fourth, the huge amount of space is not distraction like the sea of pixels you have on the Cinema screens? it's pleasantly large. Fifth, they've pulled off a great optical illusion by beveling the corners of the machine, it gives the impression that it's thicker than the current TiBook, but it's exactly the same thickness.
Dammit.
Friday, January 17, 2003 @ 9:58AM | permalink
Movabletype Plug-in Directory
I'd no idea that the MT Plug-in directory had grown so large...
http://love-productions.com/mt/docs/plugins/
Sunday, January 12, 2003 @ 2:56PM | permalink
Organica
Just found this in the my referral logs -- http://organica.us/. Seems to be of the same nature as daypop, blogdex where the goal is to track buzz.
Sunday, January 12, 2003 @ 9:03AM | permalink
MacWorld Hangover
Spent a good portion of the day at MacWorld... saw the keynote... lots of interesting news regarding this elsewhere. You know where to look.
Random_very_tired thoughts mixed in with PRETTY CRAPPY PHOTOGS:
- Safari is fast. I've used it for most of the second half of the day and visting my regular suit of sites. Noticably faster than IE and Chimera.
- I was shocked Safari wasn't based on Gecko/Mozilla. I'd never heard of KHTML/KDE.
- Really, Safari is fast.
- Pop-up blocking is cool, but mostly irrelevant. Overlay ads are becoming much more prevolent these days and harded to block. (Turn off Flash? All plug-ins?)
- Airport Extreme is slick. Bridging airport base stations is slicker.
- Pseudo-quote by Steve Jobs, "Bookmarks are hard" -- obviously, an avid Rands in Repose reader.
- I'm missing a good view source command in Safari more than I missing tabbed browsing.
- Jobs sure likes showing off those themes.
- Ken Burns effects?
- Given the variety of pricing schemes Apple could have done with the iApps, the iLife bundle was just a great compromise. Keep what's free, free... charge for the bundle. Sweet.
- Nobody, I repeat, nobody thought they were updating the Powerbooks. Now that is serious secrecy.
- I can figure out how to pay for iLife, I can't figure out how to pay for a AIBook.
Tuesday, January 7, 2003 @ 7:05PM | permalink
Mac Rumor Insanity
This being my first MacWorld as a Mac-ite, it's fascinating to watch the rumor flurries increase in intensity. I've been perusing rumour sites, but now Reuters, Forbes, and News.com are in on the game.
Now, if the big news guys have any more credibility (which is debatable) than the little rumor guys, you've GOT to believe that Apple will being releasing something iPod-like tomorrow in the AM. I'll be @ Moscone... pictures forthcoming.
Monday, January 6, 2003 @ 3:13PM | permalink
Gillmor on OS X on x86
Dan Gillmor lays out the pros and cons and on Apple should move OS X to the x86 platform. See any themes from the Apple 2003 column?
Sunday, January 5, 2003 @ 1:20PM | permalink
iPulse Gems
iPulse has been sitting in the lower left hand corner of two of my computers since Xmas. To date, it's identified two issues with OS X that I probably would not have noticed if I wasn't running it.
Problem #1 was a runaway SystemUIServer process. I noticed it this morning when iPulse began reporting unusually high percentage of the CPU being devoted to the user... hovering somewhere between 40 and 70 percent. Now, I hadn't actually noticed a performance degradation in the system, so props to iPulse for hanging out in the corner of my screen and being colorful.
Turns out Problem #1 may be related to menu extras... specifically WeatherPop. This article talks about the issue in depth. I can say that shutting down WeatherPop didn't solve the runaway process, but restarting did... so far.
Problem #2 was on my work machine, a G4 Mac OS X Server. After staring at iPulse on an 800Mhz TiBook, I was shocked when I fired it up on the server and saw how much network activity was going on. Now, it's a server so Problem #2 may not actually be a problem, but I have very little actually turned on, so it'll be interesting to figure out who is hogging the network cycles. (FYI: A quick glance at netstat shows slp being rather chatty)
Until now, iPulse has felt like a guilty pleasure. HEY LOOK AT ME I'M A MAC USER WITH A COOL LICKABLE UTILTIIES. HA HA ha. I'm happy to see the insight the tool gives me is helping me continue to understand what the hell is going on under the hood in OS X.
Saturday, January 4, 2003 @ 10:59AM | permalink
Where's the buzz?
I was doing some research on VNC yesterday when I stumbled upon this URL in Sourceforge. It's a list of the projects on Sourceforge sorted by activity. This link shows a couple of other interesting views including total number of downloads, activity for the last week or all time... Yum. Hot pipin' buzz.
Why do I love this data? Same reason that I use Google, it shows me the data prioritized by people who have (hopefully) no other motivation than to find data which is useful. When I look at Sourceforge list, I see a fascinating list of the types of open source projects that people want: instant messaging, CRM, tools (Python, JBoss)... it's a gold mine of zeitgeist. If I was a venture capitalist, I'd keep a close eye on this list because I would suggest that a project with a huge amount of activity is one which is addressing a key deficiency in the marketplace... translation: there is demand which means there is money to be made.
Discovering this list reminded me a set of buzz criteria I've been stewing on for months. For any site like Sourceforge, I'd like to have easy access to the following views of information:
1) Most popular -- For some given set of entities, show me what has been viewed/downloaded the most in the past week and over all time.
2) Buzz worthy -- Show me the entities whose popularity has drastically moved upward (or downward) in the past week and over all time.
3) Favorites -- Allow me to say, I care about this entity so that I can sort the list and only see my favorites. Also, tell me when anything changes in my favorites.
This doesn't just apply to sites which offer downloads, it also applies to meta-weblogs (like syndic8, technorati), portal sites like Yahoo (which already have much of the criteria I describe), and other large databases of publicly accessible data that I'm certain I'm forgetting.
Again, much of this is already available in various ways... all I'm suggesting is that there be a standard so I know that when I go to, say, a popular OS X file download site, I can easily figure out where the hell the buzz is.
Friday, January 3, 2003 @ 10:52AM | permalink
Apple 2003
The Apple Luxury Tax column generated a huge amount of discussion. In fact, in preparation for a response, I printed out the comments and the final page count was just under twenty pages. Jesus, folks like to discuss all things Apple.
There were many issues that I wanted to comment on, but upon reading and rereading the comments, a thought popped in my head that I want to lead off with.
I would like to suggest that Apple Computer is an absolutely huge success that need do nothing radical than stay it's current course in order to continue to be a spectacular success story.
Huh? HOW'S THAT KOOL AIDE RANDS?
I'll explain.
Once you get by the Apply ][ and early Mac years, Apple made a career of being just about out of business. Having not been there nor wanting to go over Apple's balance sheet from '88 to '98, I can't say whether or not Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy. I do know that while Apple was stumbling along, their major competitor in software, Microsoft, was putting together an unheard of string of hugely profitable quarters combined with phenomenal market share growth.
The story is similar if you choose to compare Apple with it's hardware competitor, Dell. In the intensely competitive PC space, Dell has apparently come out on top, scaring the likes of HP into buying it's competition (Compaq) in order to compete.
Problem is, both comparisons are flawed. Folks want to compare Apple to Dell and Microsoft because "they build the same stuff" and, in a very basic sense, they do. Still, they are in very different markets. Microsoft and Dell sell to the folks who need software and a computer. Apple sells luxury versions of these and sells them very well. Apple owns the high end luxury computer market and no one else comes close and when someone tries, they suck because that isn't their primary business.
The Apple Luxury Tax is applied to those people who to make a statement about their hardware and software. The statement is not, "I hate Microsoft", it's "I appreciate the finer things in life." The finer things are, by definition, scarce and; therefore, more expensive. This means the folks who can purchase these expensive items are in the minority and THEY LIKE IT THAT WAY.
This is stockholder heresy, but the absolutely worst thing Apple could do is become a market leader in software or hardware. The moment such a thing occurred, those who espouse the delicate beauty of Apple products would begin to rail on how Apple had sold out and turned it's back on those people who got them there, the minority.
Apple is in a delightful, profitable Catch-22.
First, you have the business world who is saying, you must grow to survive. Take that four billion in the bank and give Microsoft a run for their money. Then,, you have the Apple zealots. They want Apple to grow, to be successful, but doing that means Apple could become mainstream (and very profitable) and WHO WANTS THAT? Well, everyone... sort'f.
Understanding this kooky contraction actually illuminates a couple of recent Apple news events:
1) Apple sucks at enterprise/big business sales not because they don't know what that customer base wants, it's just that customer can't afford them -- Apple's gig is high-end niche player. This would suggest that for their enterprise play, Apple should be targeting an customer base who has lots of money and hasn't already spent a lot of it on Windows infrastructure. I'm thinking BioTech... clusters... emerging uses for servers.
2) Apple continues to lose the education market share. Sure, they owned it in the beginning because they were the first ones there and they had the "ease of use" bit going for them. Rumors are that 80-90% of current Apple education customers are still on OS 8/9. It's not that they don't want to upgrade, they don't have the money and if they did, they're buying value and value = PCs. The main reason Apple hangs out in this market is because STUDENTS MAKE GREAT ZEALOTS. This idea alone must drive the deep discount Apple must be throwing at accounts of a reverse switch.
Ok, other random feedback from readers comments:
- Instantaneous sign that you are an Apple zealot: Usage of any of the following preposterous terms when describing Apple products "it just works" or "it never breaks". I tend to stop reading articles when they include such claims because they don't always work and they do break. Yes, even iPods... a lot.
- "There are no 'OEM' Macs. It's a closed platform": Of it is, only Apple can make Macs. If everyone made 'em, they'd be more and they'd cost less. Bad.
- "iApps rock": I agree. What these applications do well is have a compelling answer to the question, "How quickly can I build the thing that I want" where thing may be a photo album, movie, CD, etc. The point is the mean time to productivity with Apple software is simply less than comparable products. The Final Cut Pro success story appears to imply the same is true of the Pro-version products. I can't comment, I haven't used them.
- "The truth worth": The point made here was that there is no way to describe the Mac experience in words. You must touch Apple products in order to have an opinion... this also helps with swallowing that 30% tax. This must be one of the main reasons for the retail stores.
MacWorld is next week and the rumor sites are a buzz with tidbits of fact and fiction regarding potential announcements. I predict the following based on this column:
1) Following the steps of .Mac, the iApps suite will become a product that you must purchase.
2) While Apple may throw a new eMac out for education customers, it will continue to be very expensive relative to PCs. (Where very = >30% a comparably equipped PC)
3) Whatever the "dazzling secret" is, it's going to cost us.
Thursday, January 2, 2003 @ 12:01PM | permalink
