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No S***, Sherlock

I've been an occasional user of Mac OS X's amped-up Sherlock for a while. But I'm just starting to realize how amped-up Apple made it in the latest release--by opening up its "channels" to non-Apple web services.

I was already impressed with many of the non-Apple channels added to Sherlock, like "Flights" (the FlyteComm-provided channel that plugs Sherlock into airlines' flight status databases) and "Yellow Pages" (the business directory that gives driving directions, from Switchboard). But the lightbulb really went off for me when I added Feedster as a Sherlock channel. Now, I have this itch to build channels of my own. And I'd love to see somebody extend the ideas that are there already--like adding a feature for future flight lookup and pricing, or a price-comparing e-commerce channel...

Better yet, I'd like to see Apple offer an easy way to start consuming RSS feeds directly in Sherlock. It's great that you can search feeds on Feedster, but how about building a straight subscription engine right into Sherlock? I'm sure that with a little scripting, I could wire Radio or NetNewsWire to Sherlock... or Userland or Ranchero could do a web service version of the news aggregator, and charge me an annual service fee instead of me downloading their software.
12:34:15 PM comment[ so far]

Robert Scoble absorbed by Borg

The Scobeleizer really, really, really must like his new job. Really. They must be piping Kool-Aid directly to his desk. At least he has a sense of humor about his evangelist-of-the-evil-empire status.
11:21:09 AM

comment[ so far]

RSS 2.0 goes creative

Dave Winer announced this morning that RSS 2.0 has been transferred from UserLand to Harvard and is now under Creative Commons copyright. Check the fine print, but this might solve some of the political issues.

Now, the conspiracy theorists may wonder, was this just to undermine Pie?
10:52:55 AM comment[ so far]