Curiouser and Curiouser!

Chris Pirillo commented on the ENT announcement.  At the same time he talked about a better facility for categorizing his RSS subscription list (held in an OPML document).

While ENT is doing something different (it's categorizing individual items within a feed) I can see how ENT might help to solve Chris' problem too.  An ENT enabled feed holds topics about the items it contains.  Over time it would be possible to analyze the topics and come to some conclusions about what the feed is about.

It would then be possible for software to automatically categorize each feed in the subscription list, based upon their content.

Does that sound like a solution to your problem Chris?

I'm not saying this would be a trivial problem... but it would be a big step closer to solving it.  Of course it requires that lots of people use ENT and, hence, that lots of tools support it.  We're working on that ;-)

I've noticed quite a few people publishing the ENT 1.0 spec url as:

http://matt.blogs.it/specs/ENT/1.0/

which is quite understandable because that is, for now, where the document lives.  It's, probably, also the URL your browser shows when you view the spec.  However the proper URL for the spec is:

http://www.purl.org/NET/ENT/1.0/

This is a PURL or permanent url.

A PURL is like a regular URL except that it is managed by a redirection server.  When you create a PURL you decide what it should be called & where it should point.  Whenever a browser tries to load the PURL the PURL server automatically redirects the browser to the actual target URL.

This means that when, for example, we move the ENT spec to a more permanent home we can change where it's PURL points and the link doesn't break.  It still points to the right place.  PURLs are a powerful way to use redirection in advance.

Oh by the way.  Anybody can create them.  Just go to www.purl.org, register and away you go.

However, for this reason, it is important that the spec is always referred to by it's PURL and not by any particular URL at which it is found.  We would be grateful if you could check and see which URL you have used.

Was Saddam Statue Event Staged for Cameras?. David Theroux of the Independent Institute sends a link to a page that may raise serious questions about an event... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Can the tail wag the dog..?