Month: April 2006

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I wanted to introduce something I’m pretty excited about:

YellowGatr: a piddle of news

If you’re like me and want to look at everything through a yellow glow, now you don’t have to cover your computer monitor with yellow acetate or wear yellow-tinted sunglasses. Instead you can use the YellowGatr, and get the news the way you want!

To demonstrate YellowGatr, I’ve created a feed called YellowGatr: Big Dogs. Now you can read the likes of Dave Winer, Steve Rubel, and Mike Arrington in bright, living yellow!

I was inspired to create YellowGatr when I read Doc Searls recent post where he wrote:

My point is that Dave isn’t just coming at this as a technologist. He’s coming at this as a publisher. Specifically, he’s proposing River of News as a new format for publishing. Or a new approach to it.

His message with River of News isn’t just for geeks like us. It’s for the NYTimes and BBCs of the world, as well as for bloggers whose output is frequent and texty and newsy enough to work, as Paul Kedrosky says, like a newswire. But unlike the old newswires that went from AP and UPI to newsrooms at newspapers and broadcasters (or to professionals at workstations at brokerage houses), River of News goes directly from writer to reader. In other words, its a new, phone-friendly approach to publishing.

And Ed Cone:

There’s plenty of pushback on Dave Winer’s new project, including several comments at my post from yesterday.

Some of it comes across as routine playa-hatin’, some of it the more specialized genre of Winer-bashing, and a lot of it as geeks people who know something about technology but can’t see the forest for the trees.

Doc Searls address the big picture here. “You coulda said the same thing to Steve Jobs when he came out with the iPod.” Lots more at Doc’s blog.

I thought about it and these guys are right: it is a whole new way of looking at published data. Not only that, but think of the innovation this can inspire: Pinkator, Blueator, PurplePeopleEater– a rainbow of news and views just flowing across your computer monitor!

(Well, all but yellow. I invented yellow, I trademarked yellow, so you can’t use yellow. Or, well, variations such as gold, umber, cadmium, sulpher, and ivory.)

They say the reason we women aren’t heard as much in the tech circles is that we’re not innovative enough. I’m so proud to be able to put that myth to rest, with my unique publishing tool and concept.

Enjoy!

PS Feel free to copy the YellowGatr logo and pass it around. Oh, and I’m currently accepting submissions from those folks who want to be included in my next YellowGatr: Small Puppies. Or if you prefer, you can wait for the Itty Bitty Minnows edition.

It was a bit of a surprise to read Russell Beattie’s closure of his weblog today. I have no doubt he’s closing it, too.

Of his future weblogging plans, Russell wrote:

Yep, after four years and almost 3,000 posts I’ve decided to close up the Notebook. There’s lots of reasons, but generally this is a continuation of the full-reset I started back in January. At first I was actually thinking about just transitioning to a more of a weekly blog where I write less frequently and was sort of cleaning everything up with that in mind. But then I just decided that I really needed a break, and that I’d really much rather start from scratch at another URL some other time when I’m ready to write again. Lot less pressure that way to do something new later on, and a lot easier to get out of the habit of posting daily now.

This is a sound idea: close down the weblog, and if you do decide to come back, start a new one at a different location. In fact, I’m not sure that most personal weblogs should remain for longer than a few years. We all change over time; some weblogs reflect change that flows along like a raft on a gentle river on a summer sunday afternoon–it’s nice. Others, though–rapids ahead! Ohmigod, it’s Niagra Falls! Whoa, someone go back and collect my teeth after that sudden switch.

In other words, we made spaghetti code of our weblog: leaving it all twisted, jumped, hacked, and pieced. When we do, do we clean it up? Or do we just walk away and start fresh? Can we start fresh?

When we move to a new town or job, we can use the experience as a way to ‘redefine’ who we are–to accentuate the good, drop the bad. To change naturally. Since people in the new locale have no expectations, the task was easier. Well, many of us have lived longer in our weblogs than we have our homes, worked with them longer than many of our jobs.

Even if we change our URLs, we still need that time away. It’s that expectation thing. I noticed when Mark Pilgrim returned, his URL and title remained the same, but the weblog is new. I like it–I’ll never be able to look at a bag of frozen peas in a man’s shopping cart in the same light ever again.

Food for thought. I need to get back to work. I hope you all liked the Fishies photos.

And good luck to Russell. I think he’s doing a good thing.