Gheorghe Lucian is flown around the world to confront rich, privileged environmentalists who try to keep the poor down, improvished and no doubtedly, quaint. The Telegraph reports:

An unemployed Romanian miner who is flown across the globe to confront environmental activists is the unlikely star of a Michael Moore-style film, aimed at debunking the militant green movement.

Gheorghe Lucian, 23, is a plain-speaking resident of an impoverished village where an opencast gold mine is planned.

He is dismayed that the project, which would bring a £400 million investment and generate 600 jobs in an area where unemployment is 70 per cent, is being blocked by environmentalists.

[...] The official admitted that residents of Fort Dauphin, where environmentalists are objecting to a mine, were "economically disadvantaged" and many had no jobs. But he insisted: "I could put you with a family and you count how many times in a day that family smiles, if you could measure stress. Then I put you with a family well off, or in New York or London, and you count how many times people smile and measure stress… Then you tell me who is rich and who is poor."

Using a style reminiscent of Michael Moore, whose film Fahrenheit 9/11 lampooned the Bush administration, Mr McAleer lured environmentalists into making statements that were false or patently ridiculous.

During the hour-long film, Françoise Heidebroek, a Belgian opponent of the Rosia Montana mine, says Romanian villagers prefer to use horses rather than cars, and to rely on "traditional cattle raising, small agriculture, wood processing" to live.

Locals retort that their land is too poor for farming, that they all want cars and that they are desperate for the investment the mine would bring. The film had its first screening last week at a conference of gold-mining companies in Denver, Colorado. Alan Hill, president of Gabriel Resources, which did not control the film's content, said: "Before, the environmentalists would lob mortars at us and we would keep our heads down. Now, there is a big push back."

Weirdly, I'm reminded of Drew Barrymore bragging about having had taken a dump in the woods. If you were to visit her house today, I somehow doubt you'll find a little squat out back in the dirt where she does her business.

Due Diligence has a posting on marking up blog postings to indicate the same posting in different languages. (Note that having a standard for indicating MD5 hashs of blog posts is a great idea, independent of the human language issue).

Jäger has a fairly powerful auto-translation feature for viewing blogs in other languages. Alas, it never seemed to generate much interest. We'll be moving a similar feature into Sparks! as a plug in at some point in the future, probably as button to be pushed in the lower left hand corner (under the browser).

The first line of code in Jäger was written one year ago today!

It occurs to me now that it should be possible to synchronize with almost any OPML file (even through HTML and ignore the FTP layer), as long as the define a few of the correct elements. The next version of the proposed standard will make this clear and adjust some of the MUSTs to make sure this is possible.

Once this is so, the story becomes quite simple:

• You can synchronize against arbitrary OPML files
• OPML files can define a few extra elements to make synchronization simpler
• One can define a common repository using FTP -- or other -- to make a synchronization point

Dave Winer writes with regards to licensing Frontier.

1. No breakage. I want old scripts continue to run in new environments. A lot has been invested in code that runs in the Frontier environment, one of the reasons to release the kernel as source is so that those apps will run better, in more operating systems. I want to limit incentives for people to fork based on compatibility. I don't want to create a dozen semi-clones of Frontier, rather I want to incentivize people to add to the culture, add new features, fix user interface bugs, but not to break apps.

2. I want it to be possible to create a commercial business from the code base. However, I want the general rule to be that if you make an improvement to the code, you must share it on equal terms.

I think these two goals clearly imply a base license that's GPL-like, with an option for a more liberal license, for either a cash fee, or an agreement to remain compatible, or a combination of fee and agreement. This is a derivative of the MySQL license system.

This are pretty well exactly the same terms under which I want to release Jäger. I was looking at the MySQL license and it doesn't look like that great a base to start with so I may just try to throw something together very simple myself based on one of the Python licenses and then run it past a friendly lawyer.

"How Can Companies Profit While Giving Code Away?". I guess we'll find out.

A VC believes that aggregators need to support cookies so that corporations know who is visiting their feeds. Does anyone have any strong feelings on this either way?

Interesting. Robert Scoble is also using RSS Bandit because it supports comment threading. Comment threading is also supported by SharpReader, which I just installed to see how it works. I have to say I've been thinking about comment threading also, because it makes sense. Here's the system these newsreaders are using.

There's a namespace defined by some group of folks called the Well Formed Web named "xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/". This defines two elements, "comment" and "commentRSS", the later which we're more interested in. The commentRSS element points to another feed URI which contains comments against a particular blog posting.

For example, here's an entry from Microsoft's Channel 9:

<item>
 <title>Antique Computers</title> 
 <pubDate>Sat, 05 Jun 2004 21:21:07 GMT</pubDate> 
 <link>http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9583#9583</link> 
 <dc:creator>jamie</dc:creator> 
 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9583#9583</guid> 
 <description>I just got this Vic20 today at a yard sale for 3 bucks ;)<BR><BR><IMG src="http://www.gnuarts.com/vic.jpg"><BR><BR>to go with my old old Mac:<BR><IMG src="http://www.gnuarts.com/mac.jpg"><BR><BR>Anyone at MS collect old machines?<BR><BR>* Im wondering if i should leave them old and dirty, or clean them all up..<BR></description> 
 <slash:comments>3</slash:comments> 
 <comments>http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9583</comments> 
 <wfw:comment>http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9583</wfw:comment> 
 <wfw:commentRss>http://channel9.msdn.com/rss.aspx?threadID=9583</wfw:commentRss> 
</item>

The bolded element "http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=9583" defines an RSS feed for the comments.

Here's the issues I see:

• This could add a massive number of new feeds to check.
• We have to add another level of hierarchy to display the elements.
• Once we've read an item, do we really want to keep redisplaying it every time someone updates the comments
• How widely supported is this namespace?

One possible solution is just use the "commentRss" feed to detect whether the comments have changed, but don't actually track the individual comments. When there are new comments add an icon that can be clicked on to display the comments page (defined in the "comments" elemenet). Entries will not be redisplayed, but "Pin to List" will keep the comment checking fresh...

Three things that have sealed the deal for me on whether I'm going to use the referrer field.

1. These two posts — here and here, they key phrase being "The key lesson here is that you shouldn't be messing with the viral aspect of your product".
2. Doc Searl's referrer logs. Note the presence of Technorati's home page, NetNewsWire and Radio Userland. Sorry, I don't have one thousandth the budget of Dave Sifry or John Robb: they define the playing field and if they're going to use it, so are the other players.

Since I've added Jäger to the referrer field, hits and downloads have had a substantial increase. If Jäger's showing up in your referrers a lot, it's because a lot of people are hitting your site with it. Note that the vast number of these hits are probably adding very little load to your server, since Jäger is very well behaved with regards to If-Modified-Since and ETags.

The referrer page will link to '/user', a page that will explain what Jäger is.

Jäger 1.1.1 (Beta) adds the HTTP header "Referer: http://jaeger.blogmatrix.com". This has p.o.-ed these fine folks and I'm interested in your opinion on this.

The reason I'm doing it is:

1. Other companies in this "space" are: in particular, Technorati and NetNewsWire, Kinja (and others).
2. It reflects real usage of your RSS feed. This is not "us" hitting your site, this is a user out there who is actually fetching your RSS feed.
3. Advertising, obviously.

On the other hand, it's not really de-jure standards compliant (though it may be de-facto now). There's three things I could do:

1. Keep it as it is (http://jaeger.blogmatrix.com)
2. Change it to a special page explaining why this link is here (http://jaeger.blogmatrix.com/users, for example).
3. Get rid of it all together. See here, here and here.

The last option is not very appealing to me, because as I said everyone else in this space is doing it also. On the other hand, I don't want you all hating our guts.

I can't leave it at that. Here's the problem with Usenet, from an syndication/blog reader perspective:

• Individual posts are "firehose". They just keep coming and coming.
• Topics (i.e. collections of related posts) are almost as bad.
• Topics wander off topic (usually degenerating to personal insults and Godwin's law type verifiers).
• Spam, spam, spam.
• Only a very small percentage of posts/topics will even marginally interest you, uinless you're a real sucker for punishment.
• Spam, spam, spam.

Generally, we can sum this up by saying this is the "needle in the haystack" problem. How much time are you, the reader, willing to spending tossing straw to find that one needle of information that might be of interest. I think this problem is crackable, but I don't think just feeds of posts or topics will solve the problem. Threading information in the post will, if the readers can take advantage of it.

In my few idle fleeting moments, I have to say I've been thinking about the problem of RSSifying (or Atomizing, if you prefer) Usenet newsgroup feeds and Mailing lists. Google just released a beta set of Atom feeds for Google Groups (for example, comp.lang.python), which is very neat but (I suspect) only marginally useful.

Laughing Meme has thoughts also here and here. A lot of tool support will be needed to make this really useful. Expect to hear more from us in the future about this.