Category: Resources

Snopes RSS Feed

Ditto.

Snopes Gets RSS Feed

“Tell one, tell all, the invaluable Snopes.com has finally gotten an RSS feed!

Snopes is required reading for people on the Internet. If it sounds too good to be true, if it’s a little too conveniently in favor (or against) your favorite ideological position, or if it’s a little too horrifying to be true, check it on Snopes before you get upset, or worse, spread the claims further. Because you’ll meet someone who has nearly the entire site indexed in their head, and there’s little that’s more damaging to your point then to have it conclusive rebutted on Snopes.

I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank Barbara and David Mikkelson (FAQ link substantiating the names) for providing such a fine resource to the Internet.

And it’s darn fun stuff, too.

Pass it along.” [iRi]

[The Shifted Librarian]

Another great RSS resource. Subscribed

UPDATE: the actual RSS feed was at

http://www.snopes.com/info/whatsnew.rss

although all of snopes appears to be unresponsive at this precise moment. I have gotten material from the url and it was RSS

RSS feeds from CIO Magazine

CIO. CIO RSS Feeds available. CIO content is now available in an easy-to-use XML format. Stream our feeds to your website or desktop aggregator for an instant and automatically updated list of our latest stories. The feeds are refreshed daily and the content within them is updated as new resources become available on our site…. [Lockergnome’s RSS Resource]

A great collection of categorized RSS feeds from one of the authoritative voices in the IT management world.

As I’ve come to expect for “conventional” publishers easing into RSS waters, CIO’s feeds are essentially teasers designed to get you to go read the full story on their site. Fortunately, the writers at CIO know how to write good teasers. If you’re going to use RSS in this fashion, then you need to do it professionally; give me a good teaser, not the first 50 words of the story.

Amazon tidbit from Kevin Kelly

Amazon’s not-really-sekrit 800 number. In “Cool Tools,” Kevin Kelly writes:

On average I’ve ordered from Amazon once a week for the last four years or so. Not just books, but power tools, toys, kitchen stuff, the whole lot. Given the volume of my orders I think their customer service is super great; it sets the gold standard for other companies. No other merchant online or offline has provided the ease and accuracy of ordering as Amazon does. Still, in my experience there are occasionally glitches that their email-bots can’t deal with, usually entailing a minor billing snafu. In these rare cases you need Amazon.com’s almost-secret real-person customer service telephone number. You won’t find it on their website. I once got it by calling 800 directory assistance. In any case, they make it hard to find because a call costs Amazon more, so you should jot down this number for those special moments when only a human will do: 800-201-7575.

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

Worth having someplace I know I can get to.

Technology Review weblog – now with RSS

Technology Review has a blog. Well, it’s 3 months old now, but I didn’t know that MIT’s Technology Review — featuring the brilliant Henry Jenkins and the equally brilliant Simson Garfinkel — had a daily weblog. I’ve just blogrolled it…. [JD’s New Media Musings]

It also now has an RSS feed, although a truncated one with what looks to be the title plus the first 50 characters or so. Better than nothing, but still trapped in the notion that I should somehow be forced to go to the site to extract the full value.

Craftsperson and tool

Rich Gold on PowerPoint. Christina points to UW’s David Farkas’ course readings in information design as a source of “fine reading”. His syllabus is also worth checking out to see how he’s chunked them into a semester’s worth of work. Since I’ve lately been very interested in the “controversy” related to PowerPoint, I wanted… [IDblog]

A good set of resources in general. Also, Beth points to a fascinating presentation by the late Rich Gold on Powerpoint as a Toy for Thought. As much of a Tufte fan as I am, I think the rhetorical device of blaming the tool, while fun and entertaining, gets in the way.

The relationship between tools, craft, and craftsperson is complex. My wife is a photographer. If you want to annoy her, admire one of her pictures and then ask her what kind of camera she uses. Yes, what the tools can and can’t do matters. But not as much as Tufte would have us believe. Gold widens the perspective to remind us in the hands of a craftsperson the constraints of a tool can be turned to advantage.

New weblog – Abusable Technology

Coordination trifecta: Abusable Tech (Clay Shirky). To make a trilogy of places where the net’s coordination costs change the nature of collaboration, I add a link to Abusable Tech, a weblog devoted to chronicling abuse or misuse of security tools, to today’s earlier posts about Howard… [Many-to-Many]

An all-star list of contributors to the new blog. There is an RSS feed , although I really, really, wish that the default out of Moveable Type was a full feed instead of the niggardly first 30 words or so. It's a design decision that appears rooted in old assumptions.