just think about this: Terrorists declared war on the United States of America, and war is what they got.
no really - think about it.
in the interest of ending the name election of 2003, i spent about thirty minutes looking for a name that the everyone can't help but to agree is clearly the best name for this project. failing that, i came up with "koko".
in japanese, "koko" means "individual", "separate", "one by one", "every house", and "here". most of these meanings, i think, vaguely suggest the functionality of syndication (especially "one by one").
among english speakers "koko" is most commonly associated with a gorilla famous for speaking sign language. i like the association with communication.
on the domain name front, koko.com is a radio station company in england, koko.org is a nonprofit dedicated to the gorilla, and koko.net is available (via resale).
potential trademark issue: koko interactive, who abreviate their own name to "koko", is a company that specializes in technologies that enable you to foster collaboration
. the closest match at the uspto is a patent for computerized medical equipment.
i've now spent more time writing a pitch than i did searching for a name, completing my one hour of contribution to this project. hope it helps.
brent simmons writes about why he can't afford to not display broken feeds. this is a chicken and egg problem. feed producers don't have a real incentive to fix broken feeds until feed readers stop reading them, and feed readers don't have an incentive to do that until most feed producers are already producing valid feeds. but with a new format, we have an opportunity to stop this problem before it starts.
all we need is widespread agreement among feed reader vendors to refuse to parse broken feeds. to make that unlikely scenario more likely, the group working on the format should make it clear that they encourage ignoring broken feeds, and suggest some alternative behavior that would relieve the burden on developers that brent described, such as replacing a broken feed with a link to a fixed URL explaining to the user that the feed is broken and the producer should be contacted.
i've added incoming trackbacks to the weblog, integrated with the comments as much as possible. i also added more style to the comments, hopefully making them easier to read.
dave winer writes: we already have enough mail readers, wire up RSS to email and you're done. Who needs another piece of software to do what an already-existing category does so well
obviously i agree here, or i wouldn't have written an application to wire up RSS to email. i love net news wire, but i just don't see a compelling distinction between the content of RSS and email.
brent simmons responds: The thing is, the mail reader aggregators are not very much like mail readers. They are smart about what they?re displaying.
he goes on to mention how the net news wire interface is targeted toward the content in different ways. but his two examples of the differences between a news reader and an email reader strike me as lacking real substance. first, most email clients also have the concept of groups. second, the ability to read unread items (of subgroups) within any group is a feature that could (and should) be applied to email just as he's applied it to news items.
these differences between net news wire and an email client are so minimal that brent dismisses them in his own product description, which mentions Its familiar three-paned interface—similar to Apple Mail and Outlook Express
even before discussing what the program does. i continue to see no reason that mbox couldn't have been used to syndicate news back when RSS was created.
off on the horizon, implementing initial drafts of the emerging syndication format has made it clear to me that it's substantially more than a replacement for RSS. it's custom-built for weblogging in ways that will make it overkill for something like a simple mailing list. and when it's incorporated into news readers like net news wire, i suspect it will provide the clear distinction between weblog and email content that i still don't see in RSS.