The interview with Adam Curry on BBC’s Click Online that featured in his podcast a few months ago is now available online, with accompanying article here.

There is an article on Wired entitled Tiger Tweaks Could Kill Folders, the main gist being that with Spotlight the 20 year old practice of organizing files into hierarchical folders (which incidentally is another one of those metaphors that doesn’t extend to the real world) could be on the way out. It’s an interesting read and while I don’t for one minute think we’ll see the end of the Finder or nested folders I do wholeheartedly agree that people want to see their files in different ways and find them quickly. In that sense, Spotlight goes a long way to alleviating the pain of organising all your stuff. Steve Jobs mentioned also this point in his WWDC 2005 Keynote.

This was the whole idea I had behind KIT and yet the most popular feature request was that it include hierarchical folders – I had so many I decided to write something much too long, complicated and now somewhat outdated about why it was a bad idea, back in my pre-blogging days.

KIT was modelled as an iTunes for your files; something different where you could find things almost instantly and organize them in ways liberated from the file system. Like Gmail, its motto is to search not sort. Thankfully quite a lot of people got KIT but since many of its selling points were made much less persuasive by Spotlight and Smart Folders in Tiger, I will be addressing this wholeheartedly in the next few months.

Feeder and Yours Truly get a great mention on Show 19 of the MyMacGuys podcast as they break with their not-too-geeky tradition and run through what they do and use to get a show out.

As they say on the show, we’ve been trying to get together for an interview for a while, but what with my house move and their Skype problems it hasn’t happened yet, but probably will sometime.

Anyway, thanks guys!

Simon Waldman, Director of Digital Publishing for Guardian Newspapers, gave a speech to the World Editor’s Forum in Seoul last week and has posted a transcript on his blog. It makes for an interesting and thoughtful read on the impact of RSS from a publisher’s perspective:

RSS and News Aggregators: Opportunity or Threat?

To add my completely unscientific tuppence-worth, I believe that if you have a feed on your site, no matter what you do it will attract more traffic. Maybe this is more noticable for a small site like my own, but you should certainly not lose any traffic as a result of syndication overall. Feeds don’t just sit there waiting for subscribers to come along but, along with the articles therein, are propagated around the web thanks to the likes of Del.icio.us, Technorati and Syndic8. More links to your site increases your Google page rank and the additional exposure, while perhaps not a big deal for a large and popular site like Guardian Unlimited, can only be a good thing. If people really like what they read they will come back for more. Say what you like about the Guardian, but it stands out from the crowd.

Simon doesn’t dispute any of the above but in the highly competitive and increasingly globalised arena of news delivery, no such organisation can afford to ignore RSS or the implications of syndicated content overall. As he says, it’s great for readers but wasn’t designed to make publishers’ lives any easier.

A final thought from me is that with Safari’s RSS support, we now have one-click subscription that is easy and works; increasing adoption of RSS in other browsers (e.g. Firefox and OmniWeb) and with the rapid evolution of high-quality newsreader applications such as NetNewsWire Mac users seem way ahead in embracing this new technology.

Thanks to Gillian Thompson at Macworld UK for sending the link along.

• Phone line – Check!
• Broadband – Check!
• Airport – Check!
• Email Backlog – Check!

Back in the real world, at last!!!