How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace.
Jeremiah, 52:7
The Echo Project, née Sam Ruby’s wiki pie, needs (again) a new name. I’m warming up to Shelley Powers’ suggestion (Pubs) and Timothy Appnel’s suggestion (ESP).
I just added David Pollard’s How to Save the World weblog to my subscriptions. His blog is a nonstop source of fascinating thoughts about business, the web, society, and so on. He has also done some interesting analyses of Salon bloggers by traffic and interconnectedness. (Since Harry Potter will be knocking me out of Salon’s top ten all time blogs within a day or so, I cherish my relative interleavedness with the rest of the blogosphere.)
Anyway, I kept forgetting to check his site until I saw a link back in, and that was the clue that I needed to subscribe. It will also make it easier for me to quote him and x-post to the salonika category when he posts something about the Salon blogs community.
I need to update the feed boxes on the salonika page, I know, especially since the untimely retirement of the Raven.
Dave Winer’s commitment to RSS is beyond doubt. In fact, he says he himself is content in an RSS container. He has also issued a broadminded endorsement of the Echo project, saying he’ll recommend Userland support it without, of course, backing off from RSS support.
Wi-Fi Networking News is a great example of a journalistic niche blog. Glenn Fleishman rules his beat and proves the concept. He’s the go-to guy for all things wi-fi. If I were writing an article on wi-fi I’d start with his blog and then ask him questions before I went practically anywhere else.
But the site just generates too much information about wi-fi for me. It outspecs my level of interest or ability to digest. I need other people to filter this stuff for me. I already read BoingBoing Blog, for example, and Cory is fairly wi-fi obsessed, so I get a good overview there.
It’s weird to unsubscribe from a newsfeed because the source is too good!
Also, from a much older to-do item, I added a little who am I info to the main page, because I know sometimes people like to know who’s writing. I still hate the design, but that’ll keep.
Anyway, honoring an old suggestion, I’ll post something when I add to or subtract from my subscriptions, as an informal way of annotating the evolution of my weblog newsfeed subscriptions.
The beta version of the Google toolbar (PC only) includes a new BlogThis! button for posting directly to Blogger weblogs.
Observes Dave Winer at Scripting News, “They probably could have worked with other tool vendors to provide a tool-agnostic Blog This capability.”
In the comment thread for Burningbird’s entry called Echo Project for Poets , Joe Shelby points out that “Echo is already a name for a product … that just released [a 1.0 version] under the LGPL license.”
If the goal is to surmount pass squabbles, the Pie/Echo project should steer very clear of anything that could be called highjacking. Looks like the name discussion may have to go back to the drawing board. Too bad. Echo (Matt Haughey’s suggestion) kind of felt right.
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
‘Tis not enough no harshness gives offense;
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism