Still, we need to be prepared – covering up our electronics and taking other precautions, so I was surprised that it was almost impossible to find a tropical storm warning rss feed. It is also hard to find good meaningful maps that graphically show you the strength and location of storms in a human-readable manner. Fortunately, the excellent Weather Underground website has both. Here is Kaemi which is expected to drop from a category 3 to category 2 storm before it hits here early next week.

Please don’t worry – we are keeping an eye on things and taking the proper precautions!

Here is the official announcement.

The only thing I’m wondering is how long it will be before I start getting spammed that way?

I’ve added a “subscribe by E-mail” link to my sidebar. Unlike Bloglines you will be updated every time I write a new post, not just once a day (I contacted the developer about this, and he said he’d look into it), but if you really like using your mailbox instead of your web browser or feed reader, then this is for you!

When you go to the subscription link it will show you a preview of the feed. You have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page to find the form where you can enter your e-mail address.

If you use this service, please e-mail me and let me know how it works for you. And consider donating some money to the RSSfwd developer to encourage further development and support.

UPDATE: Oh, and if you still occasionally get emails from Bloglet.com, see the bottom of the e-mail for a link to unsubscribe!

The feeds show prices, so you can see how much a book is at Amazon, how much at Powell’s, and so on.

Say you want to buy Tom Negrino’s latest book about managing your personal finances with Quicken. Since you’re smart about money (or at least hope to be), you’re looking for a good deal.

Here’s what you could do:

1. Get the ISBN number of Tom’s book. (You could search for it at isbn.nu, look it up on Amazon, etc.)

2. Add a new feed with a URL that looks like this: http://isbn.nu/0321293657.xml

(The number part is the ISBN, which is different for each book.)

When a price changes, the feed is updated.

NOTE: My Amazon RSS Feed Generator was broken, but now it is fixed!

UPDATE: While I’m at it, here is UPS package tracking via RSS!!! (via 43 Folders)

[More "feeds" posts here.]

David Weinberger

Metadata without tears

Peter Merholz, AKA peterme, has an excellent article at Adaptive Path called Metadata for the Masses:

But what if we could somehow peek inside our users’ thought processes to figure out how they view the world? One way to do that is through ethnoclassification [1] — how people classify and categorize the world around them.

He takes del.icio.us and Flickr as examples of “ethnoclassification” (a phrase he tracks back to Susan Leigh Star),. (I am enamored of the branch of ethnoclassification on exhibit at del.icio.us if only because people have started calling it “folksonomy.”) He looks at the benefits. Then he addresses the problems, and suggests the paths out of the forest we’re making for ourselves.

Jay Fienberg points us also to Jon Udell’s article on “collaborative knowledge gardening.” I’ve also been looking at some related issues (e.g., here, here, here, here and here), but Peter has the advantage of knowing what he’s talking about.

UPDATE: BoingBoing has a post about how you can now subscribe to RSS feeds of all the flickr photos you’ve commented on!

It’s mostly because Mac users like to try cool, new, interesting things — especially things that help them get more done in less time.

Windows users, it seems to me, have endless patience. They reboot their systems, run virus scanners, go nuts fixing weird conflicts. With that kind of patience, surfing in your browser from site to site isn’t that bad. But Mac users want things to work, and they want their software to help them get things done, and they like trying new and different things.

Another reason it looks so disproportionate is that, to compare the relevant market share, you have to subtract all the Windows computers that are just cash registers.

For instance, there’s a Windows machine at the front desk in my local car repair shop. It’s not running an aggregator. It probably has a web browser, but only because it comes with the OS. Macs are rarely used for things like this. But there are seven trillion Windows machines living such sad lives.

I too am continually amazed at what Windows users are willing to put up with. In general, I find that Windows users are much less likely to know how to use many of the features sported by their computer. I’ve encountered many Windows users who don’t even know how to copy and paste text from one application to another, I doubt that there are too many Mac users with this problem. The features are there, but the awful GUI makes it nearly impossible to know how to use. Most Windows users actually seem somewhat afraid of their computer, worried that trying something new might cause it to blow up, while Mac users (I believe) feel more comfortable trying out new software and new ways of doing things. I don’t think this reflects on the users as much as it does on the design of the operating systems.

I feel sorry for the “sad lives” of Windows machines and their users, but I’ve long given up trying to convert people. I understand that change is traumatic and most people would rather live with an illness they know and understand than risk trying something new, even if they believe it might be better for them. From what I hear on the radio this is why so many people are voting for Bush.

UPDATE: See the Errol Morris “switcher” ads, like the Apple switcher campaign, but for former Bush supporters.

First off, you should take a look at this article entitled “Bloglines, Flickr, and del.icio.us make RSS delectable.” Even if you are familiar with these services, there are some links to related services and innovative uses of these services you might not be aware of.

Secondly, the announcement of Bob Harris’ new blog reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to write about for some time. I’m a big fan of Bob Harris, having enjoyed his posts on ThisModernWorld.com; however, I won’t be reading his new blog. Why? Because it doesn’t have RSS feeds. As much as I want to make time to check up on web sites individually, if they don’t have feeds I don’t read them. I’ve made a del.icio.us category for such “feedless” blogs, and I’ve tried writing some of the authors asking them to implement feeds. Personally I don’t understand why anyone would use some home-rolled code instead of WordPress, MovableType, Texpattern, or Drupal, all of which are powerful and free. Many of them even work with desktop software such as Ecto which makes posting as easy as writing an e-mail. (Ecto has del.icio.us support, by the way – as well as a Windows version.) And, most importantly, all of them include excellent built-in RSS feed support (as well as other useful features like trackbacks.) But, given that there are people out there who use home-rolled code, does anyone know of any pages I can point them that would help them easily install RSS feeds for their site?

UPDATE: Good news, when I wrote Chris Mooney a year ago he didn’t know what RSS feeds were, but now he has them! This is great because he is one of the most astute observers of science policy in the US and I enjoy his writing.

• Ulysses
• Da Vinci’s Diaries
• The Diary of a Nobody
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Finnegans Wake
• Animal Farm
• Blog entries from Henry David Thoreau’s diaries

Some of them cleverly let you start receiving RSS feeds from page one, no matter when you start, others don’t seem to have that feature, which is too bad as I think it makes the whole idea much more attractive. Ideally someone should set up a service to do this with ALL of the Project Gutenberg texts, offering the ability to specify how many pages a day to receive, as well as offering the ability to start on a given day.

There are also variations on this theme, such as One A Day, which provides a one Chinese Idiom every day. I imagine there are probably sites that offer a poem a day, although I couldn’t find any offering works by classic poets in a blog format with RSS feeds. It would be great to have something like an Emily Dickinson blog.

One thing that is really nice about the Pepys diary blog is that there are comments/annotations, something missing on most of the other sites. This seems to be a way to really tap into the power of the web.