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The Morning News is holding the First Annual Tournament of Books with an NCAA-style bracket.

This is such a good idea. It’s hard to find meaningful insight on contemporary fiction—recommendations on Amazon tend to be skewed either toward fans of the genre and author or by people thoroughly displeased with their purchase. I have found that TMN has spot-on suggestions!

Unsurprisingly, I see that Phillip Roth’s Plot Against America is on list. I have yet to read this book, but amongst the sea of praise, I found the following two articles quite thought-provoking:

• Roth’s historical sin at Salon
• What Phillip Knew in the New York Review of Books

Now, if I could just finish The Confusion, I could start making some progress on my ever-growing To Read stack!

Not sure what I think about this. Basically, it’s a consideration of blog content ownership, who can re-publish it and how.

Services that are trying to make certain websites more accessible are getting slammed by bloggers who are accusing these services of “stealing” content or (my personal favorite) leading to the “loss of potential revenue.”

While I’m certainly not concerned about any “loss of potential revenue”, I am curious about how this interacts with my CC license—which is Attribution, Non-commerical.

I think I can characterize myself as a “Late Discoverer, Early Adopter”—because I’m just now discovering Bloglines. As I added more and more feeds to my RSS reader, I was becoming increasingly frustrated with synchronization across computers. It’s a pain, frankly, to have to repeatedly sort through which posts are new, old or updated.

Bloglines is great. I have yet to find anything about the interface that I don’t like. I can even mark an item as Unread—unlike Newsfire. For which, by the way, I recently downloaded the update. It’s a shame there are still a couple of usability issues (for me) because it’s the finest looking RSS reader out there.

Anyway, I’m still playing with Bloglines. I’ve already developed a Bloglines AIM notification bot using Twisted. I know there’s already a notification bot… but it’s in Java! You can never have too many bots. I’ll post it once I’ve done mulit-user testing.

The Bloglines API is open, excellent and could be part of the next Killer App. In particular, I’m hoping NetNewsWire gets synchronization working as promised!

WIRED has a really entertaining story about the creators of Delicious Library. Their “office” is the local coffee house. I’m très jealous…

A few other good stories about software development have been making the rounds lately . Namely the Audion story and the Graphing Calculator story. If you are interested in something in book form, I recommend Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder.

Don’t forget: CocoaTextile supports Markdown. Currently, I’m implementing a Toolbar and CSS support.

Civil War Shorthand at McSweeney’s.

There has been a bit of a stir (most likely because it’s free and anything free is Good News) lately regarding the release of the classic Bungie trilogy, Marathon.

Free download? Bah! I still have my originals! I remeber the days when the computers on my home network were named Durandal, Tycho, and Leela…

To really enjoy Marathon, you’ll need this Required Marathon Resource.

Jeremy comments on the Silicon Beat article, but poses the question, “where will you store your data”? Data is the easy part, what about my session? That’s what I want to know. Unless I’m using a web app (or other server-side app), I have no good way to transport my session or my state. I want to have the same five Firefox tabs open with the same history wherever I am. I want the same editing buffers open, etc. Heck, for now, I’d just settle for having the RSS posts I’ve read, marked Read in whatever reader I’m using at the moment! (Ed. I think attention.xml might help with that)

Imagine this like hibernating your desktop, then awakening someplace else. Wasn’t this the promise of the Internet? Or at least, Java. Ha ha.

The very helpful Technorati Mozilla/Firefox search plugin does not seem to be in the mycroft database, so here it is!

There is a perfectly awful article at Salon about the Mac Mini. In fact, it was so bad, I felt compelled to email the author, Farhad Manjoo:

I usually enjoy your articles, but your article about the “Mac Mini” seemed uncharacteristically stereotypical. Complaining about the one button mouse? Read: http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/input.html Assuming that a Mac that costs ”$1,300 [is] essentially the same desktop Dell’s giving away for $500”? Check out: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4895 Worst of all, assuming that Mac users are (to reverse your logic) putting their “emotions” ahead of other, more rational (e.g. their wallets) considerations. I think you would find that many Mac users are highly competent, technology-focused professionals. I also hope that you would not be surprised to find that many early-adopters are Mac users. So much for the Mac “languishing in obscurity”. This is all classic stereotyping and, frankly, misinformed. I’d expect more from Salon’s Technology writers.

I blame the MacWorld Expo buzz… I’m not usually a zealot.