In her rant entitled, "What Has Your Blawg Done For You, Your Clients, Your Profession, Lately?", Denise writes:

"One of the biggest benefits I derive from Bag and Baggage, and people are constantly surprised by this, is the way it keeps me informed as a lawyer. I guess it's non-obvious if you're not doing it. By this I mean, for the last two years I've found blogs to be incomparably more effective at keeping me up to speed on developments (societal, business, and legal) touching on my practice than the combination of newsletters, newspapers, magazines, and CLE events which used to serve this function for me on their own. The benefits of having information filtered by people you trust to recognize what you would probably find important if you read it firsthand are enormous. I used to sift through a mishmash of paper and online resources to make sure I knew quickly about developments that might affect my clients or my practice. I still check those things, but now they take a back seat to reading what some knowledgeable blogger already has written up."

Very nice, Denise. As Jenny would say, you "get it". I have mentioned so often here that it bores me sometimes, weblogs are one of the easiest mechanisms for keeping current. When I preach about weblogs, I ask the audience to try reading 5-7 library related weblogs everyday to see if they are more up-to-date in less than half the time. To me, its a no-brainer.

[Library Stuff]

You mean like this?  Good point.  The part that folks don't get about blogs and news feeds and aggregators is that they do help manage the firehose of information in front of us.

11:11:31 PM    comment []  

Red Hat sews up Linux for hobbyists. The Linux seller plans to release a version of the open-source operating system for fans on Thursday, part of a move to split its product line to improve profitability. [CNET News.com - Front Door]

Interesting.  The article refers to Fedora Core 1, which I installed last night.  I didn't know it hadn't been released yet:)

6:59:27 PM    comment []  

All Headline News is a new service that generates RSS feeds for publications that don't have them. I've been working with Jeff Brown for the last few days, getting his RSS in shape, and it's looking pretty good now. Then I asked for a feature I've been wanting for ages, the ability to have an RSS feed that, each time it's generated, does a search, and returns articles that contain the search term. I asked for it, and got it. Cool. Here's a feed that returns news about Harvard. I'm subscribed. And one with news about Presidential candidate Al Sharpton. I think a lot of aggregator users are going to love this feature. [Scripting News]

It seems to contain a lot of yahoo.com stories, which are covered in yahoo.com newsfeeds.  So is this just another aggregator? It seems you need to dig a bit deeper to see things on sites that don't provide feeds.  I do wonder how this outfit isn't just another Google wanna-be? 

It gets better, the site is part of americlicks.com, a definite Google wanna-be.  It would appear that AmeriClicks is using the Open Directory Project data without attribution, a violation of the ODP license.  Compare AmeriClick's Cherokee county GA listing with the same category in ODP.  Yep, it's from the same source.  The AmeriClick page does include comments as follows:

<!-- 
 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

 Copyright (c) AmeriClicks, Inc.
 All Rights Are Reserved and no part of this website may be copied
 or reproduced without the written permission of AmeriClicks, Inc.

 "America's Search Engine" and the AmeriClicks logos are trademarks
 that are the exlusive property of AmeriClicks and may
 not be use without permission

 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 -->

and several of this sort:
 
<!-- PLUGIN:CUSTOM:dmoz_full_categories_related -->
                
<!-- PLUGIN:CUSTOM:dmoz_full_category_header -->
 

OK, enough ranting already.  Use of others' work without attribution is just plan wrong and is a Bad Thing.  And AmeriClicks is obviously using the ODP data set to try and generate income.  I'm sure Dave didn't know this when he publicized on of their projects and the site, and the RSS work is cool, but it helps to have a look around before drawing attention to a site.

4:07:53 PM    comment []