I just heard from my cable company, who is also my ISP, that they are retiring their Usenet servers this month. AOL dropped support for Usenet nearly a year ago. Microsoft.public.* groups are dwindling. ISPs across the net are dropping Usenet from their feature list. Now if I want to boot up TIN and read comp.lang.ruby, well, I guess the days of using TIN are over, and I’ll just have to point my browser at groups.google.com.

Never mind that reading Usenet via Firefox and Google isn’t the same experience at all.  It’s not just the ads trying to be inconspicuously conspicuous over at the edge of the page. There’s no way to cycle through messages on groups I’ve subscribed to. No automatic quoting for splicing my comments in reply to someone else’s. I could go on. If you’ve been reading Usenet since the days...

Can a tag have a ‘spin’? I’ve spent a lot of time tagging lately, and have found that I need a way to reflect positive/negative spin on items I’m tagging. For example, I was looking through my tags (and others) for items that labeled “ajax”, and specifically for items that focused on the problems or shortcomings of AJAX.  I wish I had tagged all my ajax resources with something like this: “ajax+1” for positive articles, “ajax-1” for negative articles, “ajax” for “no-spin”. Or maybe, “-ajax”, “+ajax”, and “ajax” would be a cleaner syntax. As a long-time C++ programmer, I like “ajax++” and “ajax- -” a lot, too.

In any case, it seems too fine grained to split my AJAX tags up into “ajax” and “negative”, “ajax” and “positive”, etc. That sort of works, but...

Maybe you noticed, maybe you didn’t, but early this morning, around midnight eastern standard time, the home page of recent pings for Weblogs.com stopped displaying new pings. Inbound pings continued to be accepted and recorded throughout; the problems encountered affected the service’s ability to publish the received pings out to subscribers.

The problem was diagnosed and remedied early this morning. If you click on the “hourly” update links for early this morning (at the bottom of the weblogs.com home page), you will see a large number of pings published at the 7am hourly update (WARNING: this is a huge file).  These are the accumulated pings that were received while the “output” side of the service was having problems.  Systems and subscribers that have been consuming changes.xml and shortChanges.xml during this period should be up to date.

Dave Winer points out that BART now offers an RSS Feed. Here's a screenshot of a recent Yahoo! render:

That's progress, I guess. But here's the type of info I wish BART would stream in an RSS feed:

BART has a stream of events and information that is of interest to BART riders that they should surface through RSS. I'm not interested in subscribing to a BART email list, but I would like to have a BART feed with the latest "traffic tips" to check before I head home. If I'm up in the morning and I see entries of significant delays on the Pleasanton-Daly City line, I might decide to drive into the city -- parking hassle and all --...