Jason Brome

Moderately jet-lagged, and in liver-recovery mode, I’m back in the USA after spending the past week soaking up the culture of my home country.

All-in-all, a great trip. Mixed in a combination of a good friend’s wedding, and a trip to see my newborn niece, along with the usual social visits to people we haven’t seen in eons (usually held in local pubs – ref liver-recovery mode).

I’ve lived in the US for over five and a half years. It seems that every time I go back to the UK, I notice I’ve become more distanced from the minutia of UK life. Therefore it is good to go back and catch up on the latest snippets of UK culture.

Observations from this trip:

1. David Beckham’s haircut – adored(?) and very much imitated. This would be in reference to his pre-cornrows haircut. However, I’m guessing the cornrows will make an appearance on many a man’s head in the near future.

2. USA is still lagging way behind the UK in terms of mobile technology. I picked up a Virgin Mobile phone for the purposes of keeping in touch with work. The phone itself cost about $100, with color screen, games, enough ring tunes to annoy the whole office, and a customizable back plate, currently adorning the Union Jack 🙂 … and this is all pay-as-you-go. No contract, no monthly, and call costs not much different to the standard networks over here. That said, I’m not a great fan of the calling-party-pays model of the UK networks. Calling a cellphone from a landline can cost over 50-60 cents a minute during the daytime! It seems that the current schemes in the US for sharing the burden of the cost seem a little more reasonable.

3. The London congestion charge really has made a difference. Walking around London during a workday the roads seemed quieter than what I had previously experienced. Great stuff – hopefully this will have a positive impact on the air quality within the city.

4. It is still gripped by the throws of Reality TV. Not only is the demand fulfilled by the current series of Big Brother (shown 24 hours a day on the sister channel of one of the main broadcast networks), the satellite networks now also sports a 24-hour-a-day network, “Reality TV”. Will people ever get sick of reality?

5. The sad one: It seems that the UK is increasingly becoming gripped by Gun culture. I have family who live in the heart of London, with a cousin in his late teens. He’s well aware of the increasing gang culture around the city, and the increase in gun-related incidents. I really hope the UK Government find a means to curb this activity…

More thoughts to come…

Yesterday, I sent Tim Bray an email following up on his post about gathering subscriber metrics from aggregator usage.
I’ve attached a copy below to share my thoughts, and open them for discussion. I believe the whole area still needs some collective thought to come to a solution that meets the initial need and scales to future identity-oriented requirements.

Tim,
Just wanted to add a few comments to your conversation regarding resolution of unique subscribers.
First, I’m in total agreement with Brent Simmons in respect to the usage of the User-Agent header to contain a reference to the subscriber. As this field is configured to be present in the access log for most standard web servers, this immediately provides an advantage in terms of mining logs for subscriber-centric data. It certainly wouldn’t take much work to enhance existing web log anazlyers such as Webalizer or Analog to generate additional metrics in terms regarding RSS usage, e.g.

• Total unique subscribers
• Average poll interval
• New subscribers (assuming that a cache of unique hash codes is maintained)
• Feed subscriber ‘Churn’

Using parameters or other HTTP headers certainly is disadvantageous in comparison, as additional effort would be required to capture such data.
It would also be possible to leverage this unique ID field for other purposes – to the benefit of the content producer and the subscriber

• Poll throttling – at a more granular level than the IP address (useful for
  scenarios with multiple aggregators / newsreaders behind a proxy)

• Content specialization – granularizing the content of the RSS feed based
  upon a particular subscriber’s ID

I could imagine a trusted scenario where the subscriber could register at the content-providers site, and therefore enable the possibility of configurable profiles. One standard RSS feed could now be customized based upon the specific desires of an individual subscriber. This also could enable a consent-based bidirectional flow of information between the subscriber and a content producer. A simple example of this is where a user’s newsreader is too-aggresively polling an RSS feed. This may just be due to a misconfiguration, and an ability to reconcile an incoming request to a particular subscriber would be useful.
One thing to consider is whether, in the long term, there would be additional requirements that would drive the need for authentication. There are various possible solutions that would complement the described identification scenario, including HTTP authentication (basic / digest, SSL client-side certificates). Would also be interesting to consider the implications of initiatives such as the Liberty Alliance – there might be a
longer term requirement that might drive closer integration to such projects. Certainly the whole idea of certified identity would be useful in the realm of trackbacks, comments, etc, where the current model is (maybe too generously) based upon trust.
Anyway, plenty of food for thought!
Best regards,
Jason

Any thoughts?

Starting a blog doesn’t mean just getting the software running, or signing up for a hosted service. There’s also a number of ancilliary activities, (some) beneficial to the blog’s publisher and readers, that need review.

Here’s an overview of the steps that I’ve gone through post-blog-creation:

1. Add feed to Syndic8 – Y
2. Add Geo tags – Y
3. Register with GeoTags – N (Unable to open database)
4. Register with GeoURL – Y
5. Register with BlogShares (and indirectly ping weblogs.com) – Y
6. Add RSS feed to Feedster – Already listed(!)
7. Add RSS feed to rssSearch – Y
8. Add site to blogdex – Y
9. Register with nyc bloggers – Y (thanks M-EL 🙂

This sounds like a web service in the making. Anyone want to create a blog provisioning service that’ll automate these tasks?

Well, everyone has to jump on the Blog bandwagon at one time or another. Today was the day for me. After much procrastination, I finally decided to upload MT onto my webspace, and start what will hopefully be an interesting journey.

Watch this space…