Wednesday, March 31, 2010

A quote on freedom

"The right to be right (in your manager's eyes or in your government's eyes) is irrelevant; it's only the right to be wrong that makes you free."

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001205.html

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

RSS Feeds - Perusing the Archives

I subscribe to RSS feeds in order to become more educated about things, or because I want to participate in a discussion. RSS is terrible at these things, because (1) feed readers don't have any features to help you browse archives from before your time, and (2) Feed readers never include the comments sections of a feed post. This is true for Google Reader as well.

With that said, I think Google Wave has also completely failed to address the problem of perusing archival data. I need something that will help me avoid "Tab Explosion" while also helping me to track what archived posts I *have* read. While doing all of that, it shouldn't distract me by saying the past 10 years (3650 posts) of Dilbert are unread when I am trying to catch up on current dilbert comics.

That's one of the strong-arm features that a lot of internet sites are poor at, really. Email clients are starting (really just starting) to get good at helping with archival data -- gmail did wonders for helping me realize the value of having an archive instead of a trash bin. When will feed readers, blog sites, and so on get the same sorts of features?

Online Privacy

This is a great article on how privacy (doesn't) exist online.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/technology/17privacy.html