August 8th, 2002:

Going out to listen to Jazz by the Pool.

I am pretty tolerable when it comes to looking at things that might disturb or make ill a majority of the population. Looking at male genitalia, swollen or covered with scars and scabs from some venereal disease doesn’t bother me much. I begged to watch the doctor cut off my toenails completely during some light surgery I had many years ago. Seeing a picture of the blood and flesh and tissue of a human being scattered across the highway from a horrible accident doesn’t even really make me flinch. I didn’t even budge when a girl pierced her own nipple at my dining room table with a safety pin, and stayed perfectly still (until I realized how incredibly drunk she was) to let her do mine. But seeing this (caution… do NOT click before reading what it is) and KNOWING that she actually cut her own tongue down the center with a razor blade on purpose actually makes me stomach bubble up.

Maybe, as Jaclyn would probably say, I’m just not open minded enough.

Truly, I don’t mind people who have this modification. I’ve seen it before. It’s not really a big deal. I can’t say I prefer the way it looks, but it certainly doesn’t disgust me to see it. In fact, looking at that same tongue (and forcing myself to forget how it was done) at a very different angle doesn’t bother me at all. Again, I don’t particularly like the way it looks. But it isn’t my body, it’s hers. But it certainly doesn’t bother me to see it.

But these pictures along with the knowledge of HOW it was done absolutely makes me shiver.

Jess, don’t get ANY ideas, you hear? *wink*

[via evan]

I read at least 50 different weblogs. Some are personal. Some are technical in nature. Some just make me think. Some are photologs. The point is, that’s a lot of reading. That’s a lot of writing. That’s a lot of information.

About 15-20 of these weblogs are found on LiveJournal. These are easy to read. I have a friends list. It keeps track of when those people update, and informs me within minutes of that update. I can choose to read as soon as there is new information, or I can wait until I have an hour or so to spare and catch up on all that information.

Some of it I don’t read. I just scroll past it, and move on to the next. Others I read, analyze, and then read again. And LiveJournal keeps it all neat and tidy and fairly easy to keep up with.

The problem is those remaining 30 weblogs. I have to visit them individually. One by one. I might visit Dave Winer’s Site only to find he didn’t update yet. That’s okay. I’ll check again later. I’ve visited Eric Costello’s site almost every day for a month now, still with no update. Other times, I’ll check to see what Bobby Burgess is up to and find that he’s updated two or three times since my last visit.

Many of the sites I’ve mentioned above provide their content in the RSS format. For those of you who don’t know, RSS is a method of allowing a computer to “read” a weblog (or any other news source) in order to do something interesting with that data. Other’s don’t.

With those that do, however, there are MANY websites out there that will aggregate these RSS feeds and provide you with a clean, simple, easy to read, chronologically laid out list of the updates. Just like a friends list. The problem with ALL of these sites, is that you can only choose your “friends” (or the sites you want to get updates for) from a list that they create. So if I want to stop having to check Justin’s weblog to see if he’s updated yet, since Justin provides an RSS feed, a site like one of these would do that for me. Except Justin’s site isn’t on any of the lists. And you can’t just add items that aren’t on the list.

There used to be a website (http://my.userland.com/) that did just this. However, when you have enough people asking for MANY, MANY RSS feeds, the amount of bandwidth required to constantly download those feeds (while the sheer number of users will indeed decrease the number of times a single feed is downloaded) is astronomical as is the amount of time and CPU resources it takes to do so. So my.userland.com is no more. Kinda.

They developed a new method (weblogs.com). A “better” method. When a weblog updates, weblogs.com asks that that website “ping” theirs to let them know an update occurred. This eliminates the time needed to constantly download an RSS feed that hasn’t updated, saves tons of CPU cycles and saves tons of bandwidth.

This is great, except now that RSS feed is non-functional unless you happen to be on the list of one of the big news aggregation sites. My blogs aren’t. Are yours?

Some people have created desktop software that aggregates RSS feeds. This is a good step in the right direction. However, updates only come as quickly as you set the software to poll for updates. Additionally, if you have over 100 weblogs you’d like to keep track of, and are using a modem, it could take you quite some time to “update” your view of the weblogging world.

The entire system needs to be rethought. Here’s my attempt at that.

The “ping” is good. It keeps bandwidth down, saves CPU cycles, and allows for INSTANT notification.

However, while weblogs.com are certainly pioneers in this arena, there’s no reason other websites couldn’t allow themselves to be pinged as well. blo.gs is an example of another site that can be pinged. In fact, blo.gs is a GREAT site because you can customize the list of sites that it presents you, therefore only seeing notification of those that interest you. It will also email you those notifications, if you’d like.

I’d like to see it taken a few steps further. First, I’d like the “ping” that is made to reference the RSS feed. Then I would like the site that accepts the “ping” to collect the RSS feed and add that information to it’s database. With this additional information, when a site like blo.gs tells me that a site has updated, it can also tell me how many times it has updated, how those updates relate chronologically to the other updates on my list, and it can give me an excerpt of that update so that I can decide whether it’s worth visiting to read more.

Additionally, while centralization can be good, I’d like to see a more distributed form of centralization. Servers that receive pings should have a method of relaying those pings to other sites that accept pings. In this fashion, regardless of who a weblog chooses to ping with, chances are I can get updates regarding their site from the site that I choose to view pings from.

Anyone could come along and write that part. It’s just waiting to happen. If blo.gs or weblogs.com were to implement this tomorrow then it’s users would immediately begin benefiting. Or, an individual not yet providing this service could author such an application and begin providing them immediately.

The only piece left is the blogging software authors. This “ping” needs to be standardized enough that blogging software users will ask for it, and blogging software authors will provide it in their software without question. And it needs to be provided in a flexible fashion, allowing the users of the blogging software to ping ANY website the implements this “ping” protocol, as opposed to just weblogs.com (and in some cases blo.gs).

Then, they’ll be ahead of the game, and LiveJournal will be the one left in the dust in this field.

Unless of course LiveJournal starts sending pings when a user updates, exports its users data in RSS format upon request, and allows users to added non-LiveJournal pinged sites to their friends list. I know a couple of these features are planned and/or in the works. And that’s a BIG step in the right direction.