I tried Google Reader for a few days, to replace my trusty Bloglines. It’s very good, got lots of easy-to-find functions I’d like to use.

But one thing made me go back to Bloglines: Google reader leaves “unread” any items you haven’t hovered over, which results in lots of unread items in feeds that don’t actually have new items (coz I’ve read the latest one).

Bloglines makes everything unread once you read the latest item, which makes it so that I can ‘clean out’ (make ‘unread’) my feeds by checking the latest items. Much better, and enough reason to stick with them after a few days of Google Reader.

Also, the Google Reader UI is a bit too cluttered and geeky.

US Generals say they will “quit” if Bush starts Iraq war: “SOME of America’s most senior military commanders are prepared to resign if the White House orders a military strike against Iran, according to highly placed defence and intelligence sources. ”

When sense has to come from the military, things have gone far.

a 3mb file with supposedly ALL the worlds cities & towns with geolocation.

18seconds.org, which redirects to http://green.yahoo.com/, wants to encourage people to install energy saving lights. Like it.

Doc Searls points to Dave Winer thinking about the podcast device. Features that matter to Dave:

1. Self-contained, untethered synchronization, much the same way a Blackberry gets email.
2. Read-write, two-way, should be able to record and connect with a publishing system for automatic upload and feed production.
3. Must be a platform, that is, people other than the manufacturer can add apps.

About the third one, to be a platform, I wonder if being able to read RSS and OPML and let users access that would be sufficient? In other words, the device can access OPML directories and RSS feeds, and that way anyone can make directories and content available.

Or do you need to be able to program it? I’m not sure how much extra hardware/complexity/price that would involve (would it have to be a webserver itself?).

You would think there would be a website where you could browse webdesigners’ work and find a freelance webdesigner? People always ask me if I know a good designer, coz they can’t find any. But I haven’t found that website yet.

Peter Forret emailed me with an idea: Yahoo Pipes + a query language = SWQL (structured query language for rss).

I think it’s great, this could be implemented as a library for which we could then develop a PHP wrapper. The PHP would look something like:

$swql_connect(“http://pipes.yahoo.com/api”, “username”, “password”); // where the yahoo pipes API serves as the database engine.
$res = swql_query(“SELECT title, description, enclosure FROM rss:http://podcast.example.com/feed/ as rss_feed WHERE len(rss_feed.enclosure) > 0 ORDER BY rss_feed.title”);

Brilliant!