Feed readers are merely everywhere nowadays. They are especially popular among bloggers and sufferers of the information overload age. To some, feed readers have become an application whose importance is on par with that of the E-mail client and the Web browser.

In a new review of on-line feed readers (as opposed to native desktop applications) Feedlounge, which I am/was somewhat involved in, was probably one among two winners, Google being the other contender. I once mentioned Google as the primarily threat to Feedlounge — a fact that Feedlounge founder were quick to grasp. Will all readers prevail or will only a few survive?

Other reviews: A decent overview involving 10 prominent Linux distributions, even a comical review of Windows Vista

Bloggers should probably take a quick glance at the following item:

AUSTIN, Texas–Laina Dawes and Elaine Liner are pretty sure they were fired for blogging. It’s not 100 percent certain, of course, because no one ever told them so officially, but the evidence seems solid.

Addendum: New Met blogging rules spark anger (BBC)

Here comes yet another article on the significant new detriment (see more example below), but in an entirely new context.

This latest one comes CNET

In today’s gadget-jammed, sensory-overloaded culture, drawing and keeping a consumer’s attention is more important than ever to businesses.

[...]

Related items:

• Treating Online Addicts
• The Electronic Information Overload
• Blog Depression
• Internet Addiction

Bill Gates arrested in his younger days (photo in public domain)

Foreword: I syndicated Robert Scoble’s blog for a few months in the past, mainly in order to keep an eye on Microsoft’s ‘software politics’ and developments. I thought I would see the nicer face of an aggressive corporation, but I soon dropped it like a hot plate.

consider very few things to be “shocking”. There are very few things as adverse-to-logic and even shocking as Robert Scoble using Firefox and running his blog on WordPress (LAMP technology). This has been the case ever since his so-called ‘Net dad’ had weblogs.com sold out to VeriSign — a rather evil company. Scoble is a Microsoft evangelist, but he decided to practically infiltrate a world of Open Source. At some stage, it ended up badly.

Before Scoble became Dave Winer’s ‘surrogate child’, he wasn’t doing anything too admirable, but he was among the first people to blog. Then, years later, he would rave about ‘RSS this and RSS that’. It was Winer’s technology. Scoble only understands computers as a user, rarely realising the underlying issues in depth. He is no developer and no great writer either, yet his reputation and momentum, as well as being outspoken and critical of Microsoft while being paid by them is what makes him somewhat exceptional. His reputation is overrated.

When it comes to technology, I found that Scoble cannot tell his ass from his face. Microsoft employed him only because of his Web statistics. It is a public relations trick — companies buying readership (through popular voices) and promote propaganda to improve the Windows brand name and image. Microsoft had plans of employing many freelance bloggers to promote evangelism, using money. Scoble now runs on Linux and when I mailed him about it, he could only come up with a lame excuse about this choice.

If you seek a popular blog to aggregate, skip Scoble. It is an utter waste of time. Grossly overrated.

PAM is everywhere. It comes in different flavours and the way to chew it varies as well. This essay is not about meaty cuisine, but rather about the plague of the electronic age. Anywhere one has an opportunity to gain, spam will prevail. Several days ago, the MATLAB Web site got flooded by endless spam and many innocent contributers got false E-mail notifications, me included.

Spam should not be attributed to and associated with just E-mail. An initiative by AOL at al. to eradicate spam through taxation has most recently been criticised harshly. Genuine mailers begin to suffer financially, to make matters worse than the need to purge spam. This morning it took me approximately half an hour only to purge spam. As for the impact spam has on my life, I continue to tolerate spam through:

• E-mail
• Forum subscriptions with site addresses
• Forum messages
• Guestbook entries
• WordPress comments
• WordPress trackbacks
• PHP-Nuke links
• PHP-Nuke news submission
• Wiki
• Referrer spam
• Zombie attacks

I have set up cleanup/purging cycles in my schedule, with frequency dependent on severity. The chores at hand are still a very time-consuming activity and it gets worse by the day. I recently had a fierce argument over someone who used to comment spam. This involved someone who was possibly in cahoot with the spammer. Some spammers deserve a death penalty. If not practised law, then at least as an effective deterrent. Related item: WordPress Comment Spam Prevention

ESTERDAY I received an E-mail from a stranger. The message contained a much-sought-for answer to a question which I had asked several weeks ago. This came to show the advantages of asking questions in public forums (news:alt.www.webmaster). What was my question then? Well, my intent was to merge multiple feeds and deliver them as just one aggregated feed. There were issues with implementation of such tools:

• Formats and versioning, e.g. Atom, RSS v. 1, RSS v. 2
• Tolerance for invalidity of feeds
• Sorting in merger based on category/time

I wound up finding RSS Merge, which enabled me to compose the following page. It combines various feeds from my main domain. Another Open Source package that is worth mentioning would be Planet. My only complaint (wishlist item rather) is that the tools do not deliver aggregated output in feed form. They are merely echoed as Web pages.

Never post to your blog while drunk because you will regret it the following day. Being inebriated at the moment, I can barely even remember how to use the spellchecker, let alone add the image above. Fingers go astray on the keyboard. I will not say anything more.