Nathan's Occasional Blog

Some ideas for news aggregators:

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Speaking of moving on, if I want to switch aggregators, OPML is definitely great. You export the OPML from one news aggregator and import it into your new news aggregator. One problem, your reading data doesn’t move. For instance, in my aggregator sometimes I leave things as “unread” because I want to come back to them later. It’d be interesting to see if I could also export my readership details.

Do you have any ideas for how to make news aggregators better?

Absolutely Scoble, I want readers to have better integration into POSTING articles onto my own blog. Onfolio is the only one so far that I’ve found to do this in a decent manner – I can use the newspaper view but still have per-item action buttons (email, blog, etc.). All the other readers I’ve seen I’d have to get out of the newspaper view and find the post I’m interested in at the feed item level. LAME. But I’m completely sold on Onfolio because it just sits in IE – call me old fashioned but I likes me a full client local app.

I also want to have embedded pictures saved with the post for offline viewing. Example: I sync all my feeds and then get on a plane without a Net connection. I want to read all my news and still have the pretty pictures from Engadget in the articles.

Lastly, and don’t really come under the topic of readers but since we’re talking about it, I want a WYSIWYG editor for creating posts. Note: having a preview button doesn’t count! I also want to be able to ping Technocrati or other serivces via Blogger. What’s up with only being able to ping Weblogs.com?

I’ll get down off the soap box now. Thanks for the chance to pontificate. 🙂

Disney World costumed characters horsing around:

Cory Doctorow: This is a video that apppears to be castmembers from Walt Disney World horsing around in character costumes — Belle performing a striptease, Tweedledee and Tweedledum administering a beatdown to Pooh, and so forth. Pretty mild stuff, and reasonably funny. Mostly notable for the fact that the characters, especially the "head" characters are pretty sacrosanct when they’re onstage. 5MB Quicktime Link (via MeFi)

It’s the last 5 seconds that are the best! 🙂

w00t! is a favored non-word in Merriam-Webster’s books:

Cory Doctorow: Merriam-Webster has published a list of favorite non-words, w00t! Is number three. w00t!

1. ginormous (adj): bigger than gigantic and bigger than enormous
2. confuzzled (adj): confused and puzzled at the same time
3. woot (interj): an exclamation of joy or excitement
4. chillax (v): chill out/relax, hang out with friends
5. cognitive displaysia (n): the feeling you have before you even leave the house that you are going to forget something and not remember it until you’re on the highway
6. gription (n): the purchase gained by friction: "My car needs new tires because the old ones have lost their gription."
7. phonecrastinate (v): to put off answering the phone until caller ID displays the incoming name and number
8. slickery (adj): having a surface that is wet and icy
9. snirt (n): snow that is dirty, often seen by the side of roads and parking lots that have been plowed
10. lingweenie (n): a person incapable of producing neologisms

Link (via /.)

W00t!