David Akin

Do Apples need the Sun?

The Register does its typical tongue-in-cheek assessment of a possible combination of Apple Computer and Sun Microsystems.

Here's my instapundit reaction: Ain't gonna happen.

California

Ok. This is nutty. Gary Coleman -- yes, that Gary Coleman -- says he wants to be California's governor. This news comes out on the same day that Arnold -- yes, that Arnold -- says he's in, too..

In Canada, we laugh at British Columbia's West Coast politics. The folks in B.C., though, got nuthin' on their cousins down the coast.

Feedback: Size of the Blogosphere

Kamal Gautam points out a math error I made in a post below (The Size of the Blogosphere) and has some other comments.

Hi David,

I've been reading a little of the ongoing debate about the size/impact of the blogosphere, and the blogs vs. journalism discussion. I came across your post about the size of the blogosphere on your blog at and
I just wanted to point out that those numbers actually come to 0.48%, not 0.0048% as you had noted.

To me, half a percent of the world's active internet users being involved in actively blogging seems pretty significant. That doesn't, of course, take into account how many blogs (like mine) are just random drivel and personal rants. :) It would be interesting to see if we can figure out how many blogs
actually consistently provide useful information and commentary.
Cheers,
Kamal

I replied and thanked him for pointing out my math boo-boo. I also said:

Mind you, that kind of goes to my point in my post "The False Promise of the Blogosphere" when I said:

"This is coming to you, dear Blog reader, straight from me unmediated by an editor. Hurrah for that ! But wouldn't you, dear Blog reader, have appreciated an editor's presence to reduce the number of typographical errors I've made in this post? "

My math error is the kind that eagle-eyed copy editors at The Globe and Mail are supposed to catch (and usually do) before I look silly in print. On the other hand, blog enthusiasts point out that you're doing what the blog community is excellent at -- pointing out errors of fact and setting the record straight. Hmmm. I guess I'm still confused.

And I replied that I'm waiting to be convinced about its significance:

Here I guess we get into the "Is the glass half full or half empty?" kind of discussion. For me, the killer apps on the Internet are e-mail and the Web. Any survey of Internet use I've seen in the last five years says somewhere around 98% of Net users regularly use e-mail and 95% use the Web. From some of the hype put out by blog enthusiasts, you'd think blogging was about to have the impact of e-mail. But I think we're still a long way from calling blogging as significant as some other Internet applications, much as I think it's a cool thing to do.

"The Great RSS War of 2003"

Tim Bray has his own take on Paul Festa's CNet story on the Bray et al vs Winer et al over an RSS standard. (see my blog post below.)

Battle of the Blogs

CNET's Paul Festa has a neat piece the site has dubbed Battle of the Blogs. This one zeroes in on what looks like a dispute between Dave Winer, who believes RSS is just fine the way it is, and Tim Bray and others, who are ready to let RSS become an evolving standard, like many other Internet standards.

I don't know enough about this spat to argue with either Dave or Tim but I do know that, as a user, the RSS experience varies significantly across a lot of different sites and I'm not sure if that's because of the RSS spec (if that's even the right word) or because of some user-controlled attributes. For instance, in my RSS newsreaders (Newzcrawler on the PC / NetNewsWire Lite on the Pac), sometimes a site will list headlines and sometimes I'll get lots of other comments with the headline. Most times I'll get the first two or three sentences. The RSS feed would be more valuable at my end if I, the end user, had more control over it. I suppose that means that the RSS spec needs to define some objects so that my newsreader can then interpret those objects and perform some action on them. In that scenario, I kind of favour Tim Bray's position: That we should let RSS move into the process of an evolving open standard.

Course, i could be all wrong about this. Maybe Winer has an idea for me to have more control over my RSS feeds without re-writing the RSS spec.