New blog item... stop.
[ Posted by Dan on February 28, 2003 | 0 Comments ]

Ranchero points us to an article about RSS feeds taken from the journalists point of view...

"...perhaps the biggest potential impact of news readers is the prospect that they will further level the playing field between Big Media and individual content creators... For news providers, it's useful to remember that information stripped to its bare essentials - that is to say, text - is what a great many readers come for."

And perhaps that's true, but even more fundamentally, what they come for is information and knowledge and then ultimately, understanding (one begets the next). Does the format of that information really matter? HTML, RSS or even audio will probably do, and that's what Blogger seems to think. Perhaps this will level the news reporting playing field a bit between the pros and Joe Blogger. After all, your news outlet is just a phone call away.

If the format does really matter and people demand text, then some sort of voice to text parser would be really cool, which of course would require a long and complicated W3C standard for VTML (Voice to Text Markup Language). And we could sound like we were back in the telegram days (but on our cell phones) saying stuff like...

"New blog item... stop"

"New paragraph: I'm on the corner of Avenue A and St. Mark's Place and there's some dude, or girl, I can't tell, wearing a Strongbad Sweatshirt and screaming something about squatter's rights... stop."

Etc. etc. and that all gets translated, via VTML thru XSLT into HTML (triple recursive parsing is oh so efficient) and then posted to the blog as the final output. Right...
[via ranchero and metafilter]

 

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).