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Archive for the ‘WUCC Highlight’ Category

I’m trying out the new Reader function in Safari 5.0.

Here’s how it works. Safari determines if you’re viewing a “webpage that contains a text-based article.”

If so, a gray button that says “Reader” appears at the right end of the address bar.

Here’s what the Yahoo news page looks like. Very busy.

Now, put aside for a moment the business issue for Yahoo, and why Apple would be the one pushing this particular envelope. See how pleasing the Reader version of this page is.

But you have to try it out yourself to appreciate how nice it is. The scrollbar is the right user interface for reading. It shows how much better the web can be.

Apple wants to lead publishers into the iPad environment, but I’m compelled to try to lead them to the environment suggested by Reader. And it gets even more interesting, because Reader is actually Readability.

The developer of Readability, Richard Ziade, will be our guest on Rebooting The News podcast on Monday. Should be a very interesting discussion.

Safari 5, Readability, iPad and Scripting2 are swirling around the same idea, how can we improve the reading experience on the net. I think we’re poised to make a lot of progress, very quickly.

Chris Janton pointed out that some of my OPML isn’t properly handled by another OPML-processing application, and that my own validator rejects it as invalid.

Here’s an example of a file that’s rejected as invalid. It says: “The type attribute on an <outline> element should be a known type.”

But the OPML 2.0 spec says this is okay. “OPML can also be extended by the addition of new values for the type attribute.”

The reason it is this way is that the OPML Editor, the app that OPML is the file format for, has an extension mechanism that allows this. When I give an <outline> element a type attribute with a value of foo, when the user double-clicks on that element, the editor looks for a nodetype definition called foo. If it has a method for handling a double-click, it gets control, does its thing, and returns, overriding the default functionality. It’s essential to the way the editor works that the type attribute be allowed to have unforseen values.

So it’s clearly a bug that the OPML Validator rejects these OPML docs.

Not sure what the OPML-processing app should do, I’d have to know more about what the concern is. But the spec clearly allows what we’re doing with Scripting2’s OPML.

More Americans are using online tools as a way to connect to their neighbors and local communities, according to a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Nearly a quarter  (22%) of all adults (representing 28% of Internet users) have singed up to receive alerts about local issues such as traffic, weather alerts, school events and crime alerts via email or text messaging.

Twenty percent of all adults (27% of Internet users) used digital tools to talk to their neighbors and keep informed about community issues.

Overall, physical personal encounters are still the main way people stay informed about community issues.

In the year before the survey Pew found:

*46% of Americans talked face-to-face with neighbors about community issues

*21% discussed community issues over the phone

*9% exchanged emails with neighbors about community issues and 5 % say they belong to a community email listserv

*4% communicated with neighbors by text messaging

*4% joined a social networking site group connected to community issues

*2% followed neighbors using Twitter