Unquiet

_First of all, I’m doped up on generic NyQuil at the moment, so if I start babbling nonsense, I’ll make it sound better soon. I promise_

I don’t think the technologies were meant to be used this way, but two of the emerging standards for site syndication (that is, you can ’subscribe’ to my ‘feed’ with a ‘newsreader’ and be notified of new stories/posts on my blog) — [RSS][1] and [Atom][2] — are rapidly becoming key elements in a new way of information processing and filtering.

[1]: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html
[2]: http://www.atomenabled.org/

For example, I can get my [news via BBC][3], my [bookmarks on del.icio.us][4], my [things-I’d-like-to-do from 43Things][5], [email from Gmail][6] and read various friends’ and acquaintances’ blogs by subscribing to their RSS feeds. Instead of having to visit countless different websites to catch up on information that’s important to me, I can just browse through my newsreader and read the stories or visit the sites that sound interesting to me.

[3]: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/rss/default.stm
[4]: http://del.icio.us/unquiet
[5]: http://www.43things.com/person/jstetser
[6]: http://www.micropersuasion.com/2004/10/gmail_adds_atom.html

What happens when you start developing software that accepts feeds as input, combines it with other information and spits out a new feed on the other end (in addition to other formats)?

[FeedDigest][7] for one… read down the page for some potential uses of that service.

[7]: http://www.feeddigest.com/blog/

And most of my current coding projects aim to make use of that some Feed-In-Feed-Out metaphor, because I’m currently focused like a laser on how I can improve my _information processing_ skills to avoid becoming overwhelmed by the sheer amount of new things that come my way each day, while maximizing what I do learn each day.

For example, Clutter, which is not far from an initial live preview, allows me to combine what I think are the best features of a blog, a wiki and a ‘newsreader’ (or feed aggregator, which is the term used more often when talking about web-based solutions.)

It’s an attempt to create a unified publishing platform for my online interests, or more lightly, to ‘mash-up’ Flickr, Del.icio.us, 43Things and other places where I express myself online into one main ‘personal portal.’ Most of these services also have their own ways to access data from within my own code, but RSS/Atom seemed way too widespread to overlook as a simpler solution to the problem: how do I get information from other sites to mine?

And then… why not open that up for other people to do their own mashing-up of information, in ways that benefit them the most, by publishing my own data in RSS/Atom format?

So there’s this neat chain where sites can come together and share, chew, and enjoy their nuggets of wisdom in a fairly reliable way.

(Aside: there’s a young chameleon climbing down a lightcord nearby. He sat in my hand a little earlier, before I wrote this entry. I hope he finds his way home before the cat comes back for the day….)

Clutter’s the beginning of the roadmap, mainly because its flexibility as publishing platform makes it ideal for both the [icongarden][8] and the [Doing Great Things!][9] websites. After that comes the ’super-sekret’ application that I shelved a while back to get Clutter out of my system.

[8]: http://icongarden.com/
[9]: http://dgt.unquiet.net/

But they all come back to that same metaphor… FIFO.