Julian Bond comments to my rant about ENT:

Strange, Paolo, I don't see any categories, ENTs or tags in your blog or in your RSS. Implement man, implement!

Actually we did implement. I regulary add ENT tags to all posts on my company weblog, but I don't do on this weblog anymore. We did publish ENT topics with all posts for a while, during the W4 test (for example, check out this archive page of one year ago). 

With the public W4 beta we run a public aggregator for more than one year and we collected hundreds of thousands of posts. The W4 site was aggregating posts from a couple of hundreds of feeds, organizing them with the topics created by our beta-testers, in other words 20 "active" bloggers were tagging their own content while the rest of the feeds were automatically tagged by our engine using tags created by active users.

But K-Collector is a tool designed for internal usage and we decided to stop aggregating content on W4: we didn't have the resources to increase its size and anyway it wasn't our business.

But this does look like Technorati's business, they have the resources, a team of very smart people and could gain the momentum to make a difference.

But Julian makes a very good point, I will start adding tags to my weblog right away. Actually I have a very cool tool to do it :-)

Some dictionary.com wisdom:

• Topic
• The subject of a speech, essay, thesis, or discourse.
• Tag
• A strip of leather, paper, metal, or plastic attached to something or hung from a wearer's neck to identify, classify, or label
• Category
• A specifically defined division in a system of classification; a class.
• Classification
• A category or class.

I'm happy to see so much excitement around Technorati's new "tags" feature. Really.

We have been thinking about this kind of stuff for quite a while. For example this is a pretty old post which tries to explain how we are approaching this issue within our application.

I'm not sure that what we call "topics" is the same thing of what is now called "tags". I think that they are, but then on Technorati I see tags compared to categories, and I don't think that topics are categories.

Anyway, I want to move forward with ENT (maybe rename it Easy News Tags? ;-) and see if it can be of any help in this process.

I think that the next big step are going to be tools. In these years we came up with a few solutions to help users to choose and add topics to what they write which we will be happy to share.

Dave: If you're in NY and have some time to kill, and haven't seen Phantom [of The Opera] yet, take a ride on the subway instead. It's more entertaining.

Uh... if you are anywhere else in the world I guess Dave is right. If you are in New York you might want to check out the real thing.

When Apple introduced the first iPod I immediately got one. 5Gb of shiny metal and scratchy plastic. I still have it and still use it (to be honest I have never used it very much).

It's not that I wouldn't like to have one of the new ones but I feel I can live very well without one (maybe I'm off target in their marketing campaign) and anyway I would rather spend that money buying other stuff.

To further limit my iPod envy I have decided that vintage iPods are cool.

C'mon, let's face it: at $99 anybody can buy an iPod Shuffle and it only takes money to but a cool Photo iPod or a limited edition. How parvenue.

Really cool people belong to the iPod Vintage Club, the very restricted group who bought the first undersized, underfeatured and expensive Apple toy.

;-)

I'm just back from the Apple Store where I ordered the new iLife 05.

The new versions of iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iTunes are probably cool, but the main reason I'm upgrading is to get the new GarageBand. Last year I did the same: ordered iLife 04 in order to get GarageBand. This lead me to pick up guitar playing again, start studying blues and jazz, buying a keyboard and few guitars, ending up with a not yet cured and quite severe case of GAS (this is why I'm not ordering Jam Pack 4: I have no room for an orchestra at home ;-).

I like Apple, I have been using Apple computers since Apple II and never switched to anything else, but this whole thing about Apple's lawsuits is ridicolous. Ed Foster on InfoWorld puts it nicely:

An army of drones marches into a theatre to the harangue of a giant, Big-Brotherish figure on a mammoth screen. Suddenly, a young woman sprints down the aisle and starts to hurl a sledgehammer toward the screen. Before she can release it though, she is surrounded and pummeled by a team of balding, briefcase-wielding men. "That's the Apple legal team in action, enforcing our intellectual property rights," chortles Big Brother Steve Jobs. "Welcome to Macworld, sweetheart." [via Macintouch]

Apple is doing a great job marketing their bigger asset: their brand. They must use a very tight control on their communication to manage it and so far they have been very successful.

This of course means no weblogs, which sounds weird today.

While Steve Jobs keynote at MacWorld has probably already started, I cannot watch it streaming because this year they are not broadcasting with. There are no real time updates on the web because I understand that this year there's no wifi at the conference.

I mean: tomorrow morning I will end up buying something at the Apple Store, but I hate not being able to complain with somebody about Apple right now.

PS: apparently wifi is working.

Good morning and happy new year to everybody.

Dave has a very reasonable solution to the old "subscribe to feeds" problem. I like the idea very much.

I would suggest to make data mantained by the server (meaning the OPML list of feeds) public only if users will decide to make it public: somebody might prefer not to make the list of what they read public. Of course, this will create the need to develop some kind of authentication method to let applications access the XML file, but a password should do the trick.

Good luck :-)