RSS Aggravation

Are feeds implied licenses, or can they alter express ones? I don't think there's an easy answer, but a court could be asked this question before long as businesses built on RSS continue to explore what they can and should be doing with the material they aggregate. Marty Schwimmer (Bloglines, no thanks), Dennis Kennedy (don't make me put ads in my feed), and Robert Scoble (people who live in full post houses shouldn't throw republication stones) have more. Mark Fletcher expands and contracts.

A Good Walk, Blogged

Playing with Flickr and my phone's camera, enjoying a break from the rain.

LexiCon

Evan Schaeffer: "If you'd like to participate in my audio-blogging word-of-the-day project, simply choose a suitable word from Black's Law Dictionary, record yourself reading it, and then send it to me in mp3 or wav format. I'll set it to music for all the world to hear—at no charge!"

Data Up

Far be it for me to anger the gods of connectivity by touting the fact the data functions of my non-AT&T/Cingular phone finally are working, but they are. Here's what it took:

• For Web and MMS, using the AT&T Wireless online configuration tools for mMode (not the Sony Ericsson online configuration tools, those didn't work). You have to be an mMode customer, and cheat as to what model phone you're trying to set up. A woman at Sony Ericsson figured this out. She picked the closest cousin to my phone she could find (the z500) to get the settings.


• For email, finally getting an AT&T/Cingular Customer Care (she typed, without a trace of irony) representative on the phone who recognized I needed to get bumped up to the next level of tech support. Once there, the guy was able to look up my mMode email address (forgotten), and reset my mMode email password (also forgotten, no way to look it up). Armed with that information, I could then use the AT&T/Cingular online configuration tool to send mMode email account settings to my phone. There was one final necessary step before it would work though: the mMode email account settings on the phone needed to be tweaked to tell it to "Connect using mMode GPRS."

I hope this helps some other poor AT&T/Cingular customer who is silly/intrepid/audacious/feature-obsessed enough to buy a phone from outside the silo. Among other things, now I'll be able to use the phone's camera.

Firefox As XML Debugger

In response to a couple of emails regarding yesterday's podcast, it was once again recorded on the K700i. This is a really simple way to go, so I'm liking it. The sound quality to me is ok; if it's driving you crazy please let me know.

An interesting tidbit I've noticed in the podcasting process is another great feature built into Firefox. I've been running my feed through the iPodder debugger before posting. If there's a hitch in the code, the debugger points you to this post, which is helpful but nonspecific. That is, the issue might be any of the several mentioned there, or it might be something else. However, if you have Firefox try to read the feed, and it can't, it tells you precisely where the problem is and why it's a problem. Yet another reason to love this browser — Firefix!