Enabling Services

SparkPod

SparkPod is yet another weblog-hosting service. It is supposed to be Mac-specific. It seems to be based on Mac-software. It looks like a decent service. I like the interface better than that from Blogger. It is more geared towards a homepage, than a blog with the possibilities to add your bio and links.

Signature Authentication Web Service

Simon Willison is thinking of a Signature Authentication Web Service. The idea was to be able to sign your comments to a weblog. Thus the originator and the comments can be trusted. I guess this service can be also used elsewhere. A lot of work had already be done, also with W3C. Isn’t there anything that can be borrowed?

FOAF

FOAF is a standard mark-up language in order to create a description of yourself. As it is standardised it is readable by computers and can be used for searching people. FOAF-a-Matic is a service that allows you to create such a FOAF-file. The interesting thing is that in a FOAF-file you can also mention your friends and their FOAF-file. This will allow services to create a network of friends of friends, etc.

However FOAF seems to be yet another way to create a profile of your self. It would be much better to add a FOAF-structure to for instance a vCard like standard. However it is an important step towards a semantic web.

Blog Change Bot

On Dave Winer’s blog I found the Blog Change Bot. It is a quote “Blog Change Bot is a blog monitoring service which updates you via AOL Instant Messanger when a blog you are interested is updated. It is available with the screen name blogchangebot on AOL IM.

” unquote. I am not sure who would like to use this. You are really craving for news if you need this.

TypePad

TypePad is a new service for the hosting of Weblogs based on Movable Type. I am not sure what the difference is with the other weblog hosters. I am rather happy with Blogger, so I am not yet tempted to move to another one. I like their make-up though.

RFID Chips Are Here

A truly interesting read. Countless new services might be born.

Thanks to Dan Gillmor.

AdSense @ Google

Recently Google introduced a new advertising method: AdSense. Based on the content of your web-page (site?) Google publishes a text-only piece of advertisement on your page. Clicking on it might earn teh web-page publisher ,10 US dollar per click. The ads are a bit ugly and do not fit nicely into your website. This could however still be improved by them. See also Daring Fireball or Aaron Swartz.

Blog Comments

Yesterday I added a commenting service to the Blueblog. This commenting service is offered by Haloscan.com. I do not know whether this is the best Service Provider, but it is a good first try.

The Commenting service allows readers to add comments to postings I make on the Blueblog. A comment consists of a reader name, an email address, an URL and the comments. The comments can be seen under the the Blueblog postings as a short line “Comments (6)”, in case there are 6 comments. Clicking on comments brings the reader to a special comments page. This page can be tweaked by me, by changing a css-file. As an owner of the Blueblog and the comments, I am able to delete comments, which I do not want to be there.

Of course this Comments-service, is also interesting from an Online Service perspective. I, as owner (and Service Provider) of the Blueblog offer now a commenting-service to the readers of the Bueblog. This service is a Communications Tele-Service, as it allows readers and me to communicate. It is a Store&Forward Communications Tele-Service, as the communication is first stored and then read later. More specifically it is a Discussion Store&Forward Communication Tele-Service, as it allows discussion (not a good word) between multiple users. The discussion presents itself as a linear thread around a single post in the blog. Probably I will be able to subdivide further, but I will figure that out later.

The Service Provider (Haloscan.com) offers owners of Weblogs a facility to add a commenting-service to their weblog. This is an Enabling Service. You can call this a Discussion Store&Forward Communication Teleservice Enabling Service.

RSS discovery

Finally I discovered the RSS-standard. I was willing to check it out for a long time, but I only found the time recently. RSS allows authors to publish information in a standard way based on XML (I guess?). These RSS-files can subsequently be picked by publishers to paste it in their website.
Another possibility is to use an RSS Aggregator client (I use NetNewsWire created by Ranchero Software) to view these RSS-files. It is very similar to Usenet-viewers: you subscribe to certain RSS_files (feeds) and the software checks whether new items have been published. You see in your client that you have not yet read them.

Is this interesting?
- No, because it is very similar to Usenet. It does not seem very innovative. It is just a file, which the end-user can grab through the HTTP-protocol and do with it whatever he wants;
- Yes, it is very interesting (I bought my client), because it is a very convenient way to check news, blogs, etc. You do not have to check out each website to see whether something is new or not. The client aggregates everything into a single viewer, thus within one view you can see all the news. In this sense it does remind me again of Usenet, which I found much more useful than the Web until the onset of spam in the Usenet-groups.

But is it interesting from an Online Services point of view? It belongs to the category Publishing. As end-users can read the RSS-files, it belongs to the Tele-Publishing category. If you however use a RSS_file to add content to your web-page, then your re-using content (syndication) and the service belongs to the Enabling Category, subcategory Publishing Tele-Services. Probably a specific subcategory should be created due to the standard that has been used behind the service.

By the way I found already an annoying item in the use of RSS. Some authors only publish the header and the first sentence of a news-item. If you want to read the story you have to go to the web-site anyway. I rather see the news right away, but I understand why they do it (view the ads).

Well so much for first impressions. Now I have to read up on this subject to see whether there is more to it. Also I want to know what all the fuss is about the standards.

New Google Toolbar

Google just released a new toolbar (still in beta) for WorldWideWeb-browsers. One of the new features is the BlogThis-button. This button allows the user to paste the current URL into a new blog-item created at Blogger. It sounds like a useful feature (I am not able to test it). It offers the user a service: “take URL, open new web page and put URL into the form”. These are all client side actions. There seems to be no online service involved.