brentashley

Everybody focus your healing Karma towards Silicon Valley. John Robb reports that Dave Winer is in hospital till next weekend. No more detail than that, but he says Dave will supply detail himself when he is able.

Dorothea really speaks my language about Wanker Management.

Dorothea has a very complete and useful explanation of the HTML Entity in RSS rendering problem thing.

I’ll remember that for when I do the RSS translator, which will be on hold until I find a freely available machine-translation service that won’t mind my scripts bombarding it.

I’ve been reading John Robb’s discussions of The New Economy with interest.

Companies in the new economy will attract investment and be successful if they can convince the public that they truly embrace a holistic view of corporate health that includes profitablity but not at the expense of ethics and social conscience.

No longer can investors tolerate a decision by a huge conglomerate to ruin the entire local economy of a small city by shutting down a plant that’s making them $100 million a year because they can make $120 million taking the plant elsewhere. That’s NOT a plant that’s losing $20M, it’s a plant that’s making $100M.

No longer will the public willingly give their custom to companies who have been shown to compensate their executives with obscene forgivable loans.

Respect has been absent from corporate culture, as has commitment to long-term viability. Customer and employee loyalty has been ignored.

Employee loyalty has been decimated by the trend to move learning and apprenticeship out of companies and into schools and training centres – getting the employee and the government to supply the education that companies once did. Where once you would join a company and learn the ropes internally, they now require that you come equipped with a particular accreditation in your field, be it insurance, welding, travel agency, real estate.

Customer loyalty has been destroyed by a complete lack of attention to the needs of the consumer in pursuit of “operational efficiencies”.

Companies have to jump on the Cluetrain and start conversing with (as opposed to “at”) their customers.

It seems the accent problem doesn’t affect RSS or the aggregator – the problem is that IE and Mozilla both choke on accented characters in the description element when trying to render the XML in the browser, even if I replace them with their equivalent html entities.

Here’s some text that the XML renderer is choking on:

[removed because it of course choked the damn rss feed]

I’ll look at it in my feed now.

Jenny asks

my next question is how do we get on-the-fly translation into news aggregators, but I’m sure we’re a ways off from that.

Not that far off at all! I wrote Jenny an RSS cleanser in PHP recently, and it took me about 20 minutes tonight to add translation to it. I’ve showed it to Jenny but won’t post it here because (a) it really burdens the translation service and (b) for some reason accented characters in the description break the RSS feed, even if I use their html entity equivalents.

My BlogChat partner Tim points me to a discussion from Jenny about realtime translation.

I’ve been playing with realtime translation with BlogChat. I’m at a pretty early proof-of-concept stage, but have used it to good effect already. Here’s a capture of a session:

It’s simple to use and quite fast. I’ve got a whole bunch of ideas of how to build a useful translating chat. Time to leap into the conversation, I guess!