Welcome to the Heterotopia Report for December 6, 2005, a semi-regular new feature at this site, where I spend the day simply pointing people to interesting things on the internet they may have missed themselves. It bears reminding, by the way, that I do not accept compensation for favorable mentions listed here (barring the occasional review copy of a product being reviewed), and that whenever relevant I publicly disclose any personal relationship I might have with a company or person being mentioned.

If you build it, will they come? So, arguably the biggest news in the Heterotopia this week (at least for programming geeks) is that Yahoo is now going to let people subscribe to RSS feeds straight from within their email accounts. (Here's the Associated Press' take on the announcement, for example.) And why is this such big news? Well, for those who don't know, RSS (or 'Really Simple Syndication') is simply another way for people to interact with the content found at a blog; instead of you visiting a web page, for example, and physically reading the entries with your eyeballs, in the case of RSS this content is turned into a real-time "feed," which you can use a "feed reader" to subscribe to, and have this content automatically delivered to you the moment it's published. (This is the same technology, by the way, that fuels a podcast; MP3 files are simply attached to feed items in that case, with your podcast software understanding how to download that attachment when it sees one, and how to send it automatically to your MP3 player in the middle of the night.)

RSS can be a real godsend for heavy online readers, as any RSS junkie will quickly tell you; but even two years after its first mass adoption, feeds remain a relatively obscure service, with only 5 to 10 percent of all blog readers using RSS in any capacity at all. Yahoo hopes to change all this by creating what is now officially the most hassle-free way on the Heterotopia to track web feeds; there is simply a new "feed" folder in Yahoo Mail users' accounts, where one can add a feed address and automatically start receiving updates at the same place where they check their correspondence. And this is great news for light feed users; it allows you, for example, to subscribe to my own site's feed and have this content delivered every day straight to your email account, with you never having to physically visit this website again if you don't want. (Of course, this particular interface isn't very good for heavy users like me, someone who might be keeping track of 2,000 or 3,000 feeds at any given time; for that I still recommend a more traditional feed reader, like the free Bloglines that I use.)

Now, let's not forget that Yahoo's move isn't entirely altruistic; it's been discovered recently, for example, that feeds also make for an excellent means of delivering online advertising, since the ads are embedded within feed items themselves and are therefore much more difficult to ignore. So the big question, I guess, is whether this new service is going to make any difference as to how many people start actually using RSS to read online content. And this is just a huge mystery to me in general, to be frank; because to me RSS is one of the most useful inventions the Heterotopia has seen in half a decade, and it shocks me that there are still so few people taking advantage of it. Only time will tell, I guess.

And speaking of RSS feeds... How interesting is this? National retailer Target has started a new feed just for the items on sale in their Sunday newspaper circular. Man, this would've been so great when I was growing up; I can't tell you how many Sunday afternoons were wasted in my youth, being forced to sit around the kitchen table and cut coupons out of all those Sunday newspaper advertisements. Why do all the cool things always get invented after they're no longer relevant to me, I'm tellin' ya! (Thanks to Steve Rubel for originally pointing this out.)

Wikipedia keeps proving why it's so controversial. CNET has two items up right now about Wikipedia that are worth checking out: an article about recent controversies the open-source reference work has been going through lately, and then an editorial about what this might all mean for the organization. In a nutshell, John Kennedy's former attorney general discovered that Wikipedia had an article up about him, implicating him in Kennedy's assassination, and made a huge stink in the press about it; and then it was discovered that podcast guru Adam Curry recently erased factual information about him anonymously at Wikipedia that was unflattering. And as a result, the managers of Wikipedia have decided to no longer let anonymous users initiate new entries, although they'll still be allowed to edit existing ones.

Oh, poor Wikipedia! Unfortunately, because of their very mission the organization is going to remain in such headlights for awhile, since what they are attempting is no less than the creation of an authoritarian encyclopedia, through the collective work of anonymous strangers alone. And this, as I've said before, is a noble experiment but still an experiment, something never proven can actually be accomplished, and Wikipedia is simply going to continue suffering incidents like this as it grows. (It's up to 850,000 entries in English alone, if you can believe it.) If taken in the spirit of experimentation that Wikipedia is meant, of course, none of this is a big deal; but part of the problem with Wikipedia's success is that it's produced millions of fans who don't know about this experimentation, and assume that the content found there is as reliable as a commercially-based reference work. It's all very interesting, to be sure, and something I continue to watch with great interest.

Google: What's old is new again. There are two interesting articles up in the Heterotopia this week, one at the New York Times and one at Business 2.0, collectively examining a surprising new development at Google - namely, a growing amount of their employees are admitting that they could see themselves with the company for decades, if not the rest of their careers. And this is a slap in the face, of course, to what conventional wisdom has been saying since the early '90s - that we've moved out of the age when companies can rely on employee loyalty anymore, or even attempt to forge such a thing. And the irony, of course, is that Google is doing it the exact opposite way than companies in the past have; by legitimately giving their employees the free, private time needed to grow both professionally and personally. (For example, they require engineers to spend 10 percent of their time working on completely unrelated, private pet projects; and they have one of the most generous maternity packages of any US corporation.) Oh, plus Eric Schmitt has some very interesting engimatic statements about whether Google is or is not developing their own operating system. Fascinating stuff!

Apple is ramping things up. Looks like they've finally gotten serious about Microsoft's new Windows Media Center, which is about to take the world by storm - it's shipping with every new Xbox 360 and Vista OS package, and will also apparently be able to directly communicate with TiVo. As a result, looks like Apple is going to face the challenge head-on and see if they can't build their own competing system themelves; for example, they recently released a new set of software apps called Front Row, designed to duplicate many of the video and audio capabilities of Windows Media Center. So now the Mac rumor site ThinkSecret is predicting that Mac is going to almost completely revamp their Mini line of stand-alone inexpensive computers in the next six months, into a low-cost 'hub' for an Apple-based home media center of their own. (The rumor calls for the new Mini to have a built-in iPod hub, a new Intel multimedia-friendly processor, and its own DVR functionalities that will rival Tivo's. And let's not forget that TiVos can currently connect directly with Video iPods as well.) Well, and not only that, but the Associated Press (reprinted in this case at Happy News Dot Com) is reporting that the new iMac G5s will be shipping with a physical remote control now, that can control Front Row the same way a remote will be able to control Windows Media Center. Hmm, looks like the Battle for the Home Media Centers is set to begin - may the best operating system win!

Short notes. Here are some other interesting things in the Heterotopia this week that may be worth checking out, that I might not have too many smartass comments about.

--Online rant of the week, part 1: Heather Hamilton of Microsoft goes off on those stupid chocolate-fountain things that just seem to be everywhere these days. Sing it loud, sistah!

--Online rant of the week, part 2: Brendon Connelly of Slacker Manager unloads on Tie Guys - the white guys in business suits and Bluetooth headphones, bursting their way through a Starbucks or McDonald's, claiming the whole time that they are in fact the center of the known universe. I hear ya, brutha!

--More evidence that the telephone companies are scum-sucking bastards, from The Washington Post: BellSouth withdraws their offer of a free building for New Orleans' new police headquarters, after the city announces they're creating a free WiFi network for all citizens as part of the rebuilding process. Scum-sucking bastards! (Thanks to Boing Boing for pointing this out.)

--And via MAKE magazine: Cool and interesting things to do with your Moleskine paper notebook.

--Visa has already started a blog for the 2006 Winter Olympics. Let the commercialization begin. Sigh. (Thanks to Steve Rubel for pointing this out.)

--And now we finally know: Mozart and dog whistles are how to keep unruly teens from hanging out in front of your store. (Thanks to the Artful Manager for pointing this out.)

--Turns out that National Public Radio has been having huge successes with their new podcasting experiments. The secret? Make them radically different from radio shows. I've been saying that all along, people! Will you finally trust me now that NPR is saying it, too? (And thanks again to the Artful Manager - what a smartie!)

--Here's an interesting use for all those military bases getting closed down these days, via Space.com: a possible spaceport instead, for the private spacecraft industry.

--Interesting news from the world of medicine - turns out that in some cases, cochlear implants are stimulating dead aural synapses back to life, effectively helping to resurrect a deaf person's natural hearing system back into a working one. Will miracles never cease?

--Okay, ya fuckin' hippies - you can keep trading your Grateful Dead bootlegs online already. Jeesh!

--Big news for scholars: The Library of Congress just posted its one millionth free online image. (Thanks to TeleRead for pointing this out.)

--Fortune magazine speculates on the next obsolete thing paper newspapers will likely stop carrying soon: classified ads, perhaps?

--And finally, a moment of silence please for Stan Berenstain, creator of those lovable (and ubiquitous) Berenstain Bears, who passed away this week. Although I gotta admit, when I was a kid I was a much bigger fan of Richard Scarry.

(Got something you'd like to see mentioned in the Heterotopia Report? Send it my way at [ilikejason at hotmail dot com], although I of course can't make any guarantees.)