Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

I've switched to using Google Reader as my main RSS platform (as my long term synchronisation tool Newsgator is turning off its platform at the end of August).

The change has been relatively painless thanks to the tools built into the latest beta versions of FeedDemon and NetNewsWire, and as an added benefit it means I can now use its Shared Items feature to highlight RSS feed items I found particularly useful or interesting.

If you think you might find what I find interesting interesting, you can find my shared items here. I've also made it an LJ syndicated account, as sbisson_shared.

Share and enjoy!

IT Pro has updated its blog software to Wordpress MU, and with that come a whole new set of RSS feeds. Instead of the single feed that all of the blogs had, there's now a feed for each of the blogs on the site.

I've created a new syndicated account for our column: itpro_sandm

We post articles there at least twice a week.

Enjoy!

The answer has to be the rather useful Popurls.

Find out what's been dugg, redd, del.icio.used, flickrd, metafiltered, slashdotted, odeod, farked, furled and youtubed in one glossy Web 2.0 site.

A definite one for the bookmarks (and possibly the home page if it turns our to be as useful as it looks)...

...from its old home on Blogspot to a brand-spanking new site on Wordpress.com. So you'll now find "A New IT World" at itphasechange.wordpress.com.

Blogspot was getting a little too full of spammers for my liking (and that made it harder to get indexed or linked), so it was time to move. I've found Wordpress.com's tools excellent - I was able to copy across the old site, comments and all, in just a few minutes, and I'm slowly getting it tweaked just the way I want.

The LJ syndication, itphasechange, has been moved, so no need to change anything there.

If you're using another RSS reading tool you should have had a pointer to the new RSS feed already.

I've suddenly noticed that LJ is now using the Mozilla RSS icon to indicate feeds. It's rapidly becoming the accepted alternative to the misleading old orange XML block - especially now that Internet Explorer 7.0 will be using it.



So links to feeds now look like this itphasechange. Score one for a common UI for the web.

In a truce in the browser wars, Microsoft has agreed with Mozilla that the standard browser icon for RSS will be the friendly orange button from Firefox...

I’m excited to announce that we’re adopting the icon used in Firefox. John and Chris were very enthusiastic about allowing us (and anyone in the community) to use their icon. This isn’t the first time that we’ve worked with the Mozilla team to exchange ideas and encourage consistency between browsers, and we’re sure it won’t be the last.

Apparently the Mozilla folk are happy for anyone to use it - so let's hope we see Opera and Safari pick up on the Mozilla move. After all, there's one thing that's good for the web, and that's consistent semiotics.

<rant text ="And it's not that annoying and incorrect XML icon that certain people want everyone to use. RSS - and ATOM - are XML languages. The relationship between XML and the web is much bigger than just content syndication, and it shouldn't be trivialised in a misleading orange blob." />

One of my favourite comics has become a web-to-print experiment. You can now see each page of Carla Speed McNeil's wonderful far future SF story Finder as she completes them.

Currently we're close to the end of issue 38, with two pages a week promised.

There's an RSS feed here for news of when a new page is uploaded (it behaves oddly in IE and Firefox, but aggregators cope well enough) and a LJ feed at finder_pages.

Google has just launched its beta RSS reader. An online tool like Bloglines, it imports OPML lists of your RSS feeds from your existing readers and seems to display full text feeds in an AJAX browser. There's filtering and search as well (which is what you'd expect from the folk at Google).

You will need a Google account to use it. Not surprising, as it stores subscription information.

I'll be playing with it over the next few days - once I've persuaded it to import my blogroll...

Update: This is looking very interesting, with keyboard controls and a "lens" UI for the reader.

A New IT World is my new blog, focusing on the big changes now happening in the IT world.

The world of enterprise IT is changing - from server to desktop and everywhere in between.

You've heard the buzzwords: service architectures, loosely coupled applications, virtualisation, serialisation, network storage, network processing. These are just some of the ways in which the way we do IT are changing - a change that will have as much effect on the way businesses work as the arrival of the desktop PC.

I'm Simon Bisson, a technology journalist and consultant who's been writing about these issues for a long time now - and with the real world experience of designing and building large-scale loosely coupled systems: from telecom research labs to the early days of national ISPs, and from photo hosting platforms to telecom service platforms. It's been a long road from the early '90s to today - and a lot is happening around the world.

A lot of what I've been writing recently in my pieces for The Guardian and elsewhere has been about what I'm calling a "phase change in Enterprise IT". It's that point where all these changes are coming together to change the way we design and deliver IT. It's a place where hardware is abstract, where the OS and storage are virtual, where UI becomes contextual, and where process and service mean much more than applications.

I've syndicated it at: itphasechange.

Enjoy.

NPR has put together a list of 130 show excerpts that are being timeshifted via RSS.

It's still an experiment, so no full shows at present, while they try and understand bandwidth and demand. Perhaps they should mix podcasting and bittorrent...

The topic sort is probably the best way to find the shows you want. I've used it to pull up a list of the available literary shows.

(Still no "Car Talk".)