One of the last things Marshall McLuhan did was attempt another rewrite of Understanding Media (highly reommended) and result posthumously was the book with his son called "Laws of Media". I'd love to create a site where people could give their opinions apply to the media analysis. And they comment on the proposed law.

My son would probably call most CMS products "old school." (It should be a four letter word.)

The web falls into the old way of doing business: publishing. Micro-content is the first meme that moves us out of the Amos and Andy Show and into the "message" of the new medium. (Let me explain. Amos and Andy was a very, very popular radio show that was redone for television. It did not work. The concept and use of a sound byte did not work in newspapers. The sound byte of internet content is mostlikely "microcontent." Exploit it, now.)

So start thinking about microcontent intead of pages. I know this is hard for people with a publication background (I'd perfer to use bias, but then peopel would not understand.) Work to free yourself from the old media!

Anyways, my hands are now full of glue -- which is a bad think - and I'm peeling it off between keyboard hits.

The BBC and New York Times are the veterans of this group. I'm not sure how long the Christian Science Monitor has offered their Learning feed. More recent are the Philly papers and now the Washington Post.

Please let me know if you know of additional feeds.

I know that you can put link into <link> or <guid>.

Makes it easy for feeders, difficult for programmers.

Back to the Chicken and Egg: so I was thinking on the walk home from work, that with HEMS and Bletter both creating and reading RSS feeds, it is very hard to say in which software you produce the content. Do you start with Bletter and then read the RSS feed into HEMS? Or the other way around? And how much can you slice and dice, cut and paste, mix and match items (articles) from different feeds to create a new feed?

I'm excited and motivate to get this into HEMs very soon.

First, Jammin' Java has changed and is great. Check out that bands/performers that will be there. I don't know how or when it changed from a Christian music venue, but it is great now. And the sound tonight was very, very good.

If you even know the name Smithereens, you would have enjoyed this show. Pat just kept playing and having fun. His comments were wonderful about the single chord in Neil Young's song, then two chords in Fleetwood Mac. He also did an acoustic of Black Sabbath that had everyone of the 30 people laughing. In his finale of "Blood and Roses" he mixed in the Who and encouraged the audience to sing along. Can not wait to see him at VA Beach.

Pat is trying to promote a different business model for music. He's looking for patrons on his site. Interesting concept that might work.

Also, he recently produced/directed a movie. Walt bought a copy. Should be interesting given all of the horror movie stuff on his web site.

A simple example is a web page that shows a geographic map. Clicking on an area of the map brings up the appropriate document. Assuming a map of the US this Hyper Document would consist of 50 state pages and 1 map page. This does not translate to RSS.

An option to explore is storing all 51 pages in 51 RSS items and then using OPML to loosely relate the items.

mmmm...

A prime example is my remodeling of my house. I enjoy it for many reasons. It is fun, not work. Something very different than my work which involves no physical labor. I'm learning a lot about engineering first hand that I did not learn by the book in engineering school. In previous generations, this would have been part of the work for the males in the household.

An easier example is probably my bike riding. I spend hours on many weekends and after work riding my bike. It is recreation and exercise. There is little practical purpose for me to ride 35 miles to get a beer at the Old Dominion brew pub. The point is that bike riding is fun. In previous times, bikes were primarily transportation. But now that technology has mainly be replaced by the car. This allows the bike to be used as a pastime.

So if you are looking for a new hobby, look in the past. You'll find a pastime there.

Actually, the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the typesetter, it had on the cover "Massage" as it still does. The title should have read "The Medium is the Message" but the typesetter had made an error. When Marshall McLuhan saw the typo he exclaimed, "Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!" Now there are four possible readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: "Message" and "Mess Age," "Massage" and "Mass Age.

I'm still trying to work out logistics, but I hope to be there.

It is these synthetic feeds that become useful to populate more top level web pages. For example, your home page might lead to the fruit page which would lead to the apple, pear and mango pages. So the content of your second level page could be the synthesized feed. And users could subscribe to the RSS feed or the enewsletter. However comments would be in the apple, orange or mango archives (permalink) page.

Another option for synthetic feeds is to create personalized pages. Instead of creating separate areas on a page like MyYahoo or Netscape.com, let the user select their feeds and then combine them into one. So in one area they see all of the latest news.

So synthentic feeds provide you another level of content.

Hopefully this effort produces several initial feeds. This is just like publishing books, magazines or other materials in that you can never be sure which feeds will succeed. So plan to roll out several over a few months with the understanding that you might fold up a feed or two along the way.

The tools used to produce this content is the same tools used to produce blogs and takes advantage of all of the tools for promoting blogs. For example, one could use Manilla or TypePad to create the content. They allow editing, access control, posting the message, notifying blogger.com and other sites that the content is update, writing the RSS file and storing the archive. They also allow users to comment and possibly display links back to the content from other sites. These products can also send emails to an email list manager (e.g., Lyris) or can be used with Bletter for more customization.

So this most important content is stored in RSS with the web interface being handled by a blogging tool. This gives you web pages, archives, RSS feeds and enewsletter to reach your audience.

Second, not all content fits in RSS. For example, you could have a map of North America and clicking on a country retrieved a document about that country. This would require several pages of HTML (or tricky JavaScript or Flash coding). This type of document, that I'll call a hyper document, is not meant for RSS.

Third, just because content is stored in an XML file does not mean that the web page has to be generated dynamically. Static web pages provide faster response to users' clicks and use 90% less server resources. So it is beneficial to have the most frequently requested pages reside on the web server as static HTML pages which are created from RSS feeds, templates and other content.

So this is what I mean by an RSS driven Internet Site.