The Sixth Layer: A Business Blog

Building an example of how to build a churning queue for blog posting bandits on the internet... this Blogger blog on blogspot.com is a good example of a content channel, the basic "news output," the first step to recognition in any sort of publishing company. The most you can ask for in the realm of consumable content (here we're talking newspaper articles, not video games) is a content author who provides content in text, audio, video, and URL formats.

Visit the Posts (Atom) feed link on the bottom of the front page and find the FeedBurner RSS frontend which shows the content in this blog: I am generally not posting MP3 or Video content, but the capability is there between Blogger and FeedBurner to add media files for a rich feed viewer such as iTunes to recognize and retrieve. You can include podcast content in your blog postings!

Text articles with embedded content can be viewed in a web browser and podcasts can be scanned in a podcast aggregator. Now, what about those URL-based posts with titles, text summaries and tag data: they're all coming from a particular account on the del.icio.us service, and if you have the account name you can request the set of tags by URL. But, what if you want to edit these tags?

What if you want to collect a group of posts, and tag them all a certain way? What if you want to drill down inside a large set of already tagged posts, and update the tags for a subset? The interface to handle this behavior has already been developed with tagging for gmail, but the feature described here is not available on this database... yet.

I'm on a mission to build this feature into my workflow. Anybody want to stop me? Please, I'm begging you, tell me this feature already exists before I write it myself!

Shoes from China

I have agreed to purchase some shoes from a vendor in China. The check is in the mail, as soon as the bank holiday is over I intend to cash it and the money will be delivered via Western Union. I hope there's nothing illegal about this, it feels somehow scandalous in my experience! Think about cleaning houses...

My favorite house was the one which contained so much dirt beneath the rugs, I was nearly certain that I had begun pulling up foundation from beneath the floorboards! I pulled quite easily 10 bags of hair, dirt and sand from beneath an area rug no bigger than an 10x10' area! The family owned a Dyson if I remember correctly, and the maiden of the house was so happy with her previous purchase that I didn't have the heart to sell her another vacuum cleaner that I knew she wouldn't use anyway.

As I was saying before, when you clean your house, you want to finish at the end of the day and have a clean house! It's not like weeding a garden, especially if you've planted something from seed and you don't know what to expect the sprouts to look like. I have to familiarize myself with the appearance of Zucchini, Lavender, Catnip, Eggplant, Spinach, Tomato, and one other plant whose name escapes me. If I fail, I risk pulling the very seeds I wish to sow! Then what will these animals eat?

More notes on immigration reform soon.

Yours truly,
Kingdon

Some things are Not The Same

Running a Nursing Home is not really anything like Waste Management, and I hope you all know how serious I am about this! Also immigration reform is not like gardening, is not like cleaning a house. It's another issue altogether.

Rather than starting in the middle, lets discuss the area in which I have the most experience. Cleaning a house! Actually I was only in this line of work for one week, but it was a high-paying week! I worked for the Kirby Company going door to door, to see if anyone wanted a free cleaning service and maybe buy a vacuum when I was finished. The only customers I made were my parents and grandmother, who each bought Kirby Cleaning Machines for their homes.

Still I did convince a number of people, at least 4 home owners, to invite me inside of their home and I wish I had kept a diary of my experiences. I met some very interesting characters in a week's time! But certainly nothing like the excitement of Monday morning in China!

Breaking news, I will be with you shortly after the completion of a business deal.