Goodbye discussion boards, hello blogs
MSNBC Embraces Blogs.

“MSNBC.com, consistently ranked among the top news destinations on the Web, is about to invest a chunk of important virtual real estate into the blog concept. MSNBC.com has killed its discussion boards, with their 18 million posts per month, and instead plans to establish by the end of August what it will call “Weblog Central,” a portal of regularly updated lists of blogs from throughout the Web, arranged by subject. It will include links to MSNBC.com’s own blogs as well.” [National Journal]

Wow - portal of regularly updated blogs arranged by subject. I sure hope they brought in some librarians and information architects to help build it. [The Shifted Librarian]

The above is a perfect example of why this blog went from being hand-coded to using Radio UserLand.  You may ask, how can MSNBC hope to aggregate information from thousands of blogs into one format?  Well, with Radio UserLand, Blogger, and similar software, it’s simple.  Any blogger can publish their news feed.  Anyone else can pick up that feed and choose whatever items they want to include in their blog, perhaps commenting on it too.  And it’s not just blogs publishing news feeds, newspapers like the Guardian and the New York Times are making their news feed available to blogs too.  For free.

Back to MSNBC.  To list blog content on their site, they simply subscribe to all the blog feeds - and there are thousands - and publish them on their site.  Then, people can add comments, thoughts, etc.  Just like I’m doing with this news item!

It’s about collaboration, it’s about news for free.  Publish something on your blog and in two hours maybe it’s on dozens of other blogs, with people making comments, reaching people you might never have reached otherwise.

For the geek-inclined, this is done via XML (and its variants like XML-RPC and SOAP).  Many web sites are written in HTML, which, while fine enough, can’t communicate to other websites.  XML can, it is souped-up HTML that can talk to other XML sites, send and receive data.  A whole new world.

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Attack of the killer smog cloud
Asian Smog Cloud Threatens Millions, Says U.N. [New York Times: International News]

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Has the Iraq war has already started?
Is the US invasion of Iraq already underway?. According to DEBKAfile: “Tuesday August 6, at 0800 hours Middle East time, US and British air bombers went into action and destroyed the Iraqi air command and control center at al-Nukhaib in the desert between Iraq and Saudi Arabia.”

If that was all, I wouldn’t have given it a second glance, as stuff like that has been going on for a few years now. But the following is what caught my eye: “Turkey Seizes Critical Bamerni Airport in North Iraq - Hurriyet. Strategic Airfield Now Occupied by Turkish 5,000-Strong Force With US Special Forces Troops” [kuro5hin.org]

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The weather, apparently, has gone mad
Massive storms hit Asia, Russia, and Eastern Europe yesterday. Many deaths.  Widespread flooding.  Meanwhile other areas, like much of the U.S., have severe drought.  India has suffered both severe drought and bad storms.

Could this be due to the emerging El Nino?  Maybe.  More likely, we’re seeing the first effects of global warming, something even the fossilized dinosaurs in the Bush Administration have finally been forced to admit exists.

Let’s hope we (as a planet) act on this before it really is too late.  This isn’t a Green issue, this is a planetary issue.

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You won’t believe this one
From Dave Winer, coder and blogger extraordinaire, comes this alert on yet another noxious bill in Congress.

“Rep. Howard L. Berman, D-Calif., formally proposed legislation that would give the industry unprecedented new authority to secretly hack into consumers’ computers or knock them off-line entirely if they are caught downloading copyrighted material.

Yes, the entertainment industry wants to legally be able to hack into your computer to see if you have pirated files, then sabotage your computer if they find them.

The fine folks at the EFF have an action item about this..

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