Lots of interesting things happening in the RSS space. MediaPost Daily (free registration required) has an interesting run-down on the anxiety level among mostly ad-sponsored publishers concerned that the pressure to deploy RSS feeds could eat into their bottom line. MediaMusings talks about one solution – customized, branded RSS readers like C|net’s Newsburst. I’ve fooled around with the C|Net application, and the interface/organization of items doesn’t thrill me. It’s still beta, and I’ll continue to fool around with it. But for my true RSS fix, I’ll continue to stick with zFeeder for now.
TMBG New Kids on the Block
My favorite geek band, They Might be Giants, is releasing their second kids collection tomorrow. Hat tip to Daddytypes blog for the heads-up. With Baby Trotz on the way, I’m dreading the insipid, tenative and timid junk which passes for most ‘Children’s Music’ — but TMBG’s Here Come the ABC’s (CD and DVD) should be a welcome respite from most of that. My friends John and Jana played a lot of TMBG for their twins when they were younger – and yeah, they did have some trouble explaining why the boys liked to sing S-E-X-X-Y in preschool. These songs should be a bit more age appropriate. Amazon has an interview with the band, and the TMBG site has some DVD video samples.
Halo2 and RSS
As Joystiq puts this, ‘Stats Ahoy!’ A previously under reported feature of Halo2 is the ability to access gamertag and clan statistics as XML on Bungie.net. I haven’t fooled around with this, but it sounds quite intriguing. If I had more time to play the damn game, I might dig into this and add my (lame) stats to Trotz.com, but that will have to wait. Still interesting concept I’d like to see in more games. Bungie.net’s explanation of how this works and a page here with a collection of Halo2 stats tools.
New Postal Service EP
The weekly email from the iTunes music store featured a gem this morning – The Postal Service EP We Will Become Silhouettes. It features several versions of songs from their disc Give Up from 2003, and a new song called Be Still My Heart. Worth a listen for $3.96 from the iTMS.