The CBC Disclosure special Political Animal that aired this Tuesday was actually quite informative and entertaining. And, unusually for the CBC, the website for the special is simple, well-designed, and contains the complete video, in three formats, of the entire television program. Bravo, CBC.

If you go to Google and search for “how big is a shipping container?”, this is your first search result:

I am delighted by this, both as a prideful parent of a useful post, but also because the Google abstract of the post actually provides a complete answer to the question.

If the sum purpose of my life is to help people find out what the size of a shipping container is, perhaps I will have lived a useful life. So far, 171 people from around the world have been so-helped.

And I think there’s a useful commercial lesson to be learned here: the best way to drive traffic to your commecial website us to honestly and completely describe what you have to offer the world.

For example: my post-competitive-society officemates at silverorange have engineered an excellent website for Veseys. And Veseys’ Big Thing is Seeds for Shorter Seasons.

But if you search Google for where can I buy seeds for shorter seasons?, you’ll find some links that mention Veseys by name, but no link back to Veseys’ own website. I suspect that much of the reason for this is that Veseys only uses the phrase once on their website.

I’m not holding this up as a failure — I’ve no idea if Veseys really wants to drive home the “short seasons” thing on the web at all, for example — but simply as a situation where it would be very, very, easy for Veseys, at no cost, to own Google searches for “where can I buy seeds for shorter seasons?” in the same way that I own shipping container size questions.

And just to demonstrate that I am the pot calling the kettle black, a search for where can I buy the old farmer’s almanac? doesn’t highlight the Almanac.com website of the publishers as well as it might.

And that’s simply because the words “buy the old farmer’s almanac” don’t actually appear on the Almanac.com front page anywhere.

Now that I own shipping containers, I’m going to try and branch out into particle beam weapons and goat herding aftercare.

In the comments to my Note to New Webloggers (both here and over on Mattville) there’s been some suggestion that RSS is something that’s “good for people addicted to weblogs” (my paraphrase) but that regular old folks don’t need it.

I want to describe why that’s not true. But to do so means starting with a primer on RSS. So here goes.

The atom of the weblog is the post. This is a post you’re reading now. It has a title, a date, and some content. A weblog is a collection of posts, arranged chronologically.

RSS — there are various definitions of the acronym, but I like Really Simple Syndication the best — makes all of the posts on a weblog available to others in a structured format that allows each post and its components to be sliced and diced and examined and indexed and sorted and searched.

Why do we need something like RSS for that?

Well, let’s take a Matt’s blog as an example. This particular post has a permalink, which is to say it has a web address that, if called up in a web browser will take one directly to the start of the post. But the text of the post appears on a page that also contains a lot of other posts.

Because that post is simply a needle in a haystack of other material, it’s relatively hard (i.e. hard enough that few would bother) to train a computer to figure out where one post starts and another starts. In other words, for most intents and purposes, the post is painted on a wall with a bunch of other posts, and loses its identity as a post. To a real person, with a good memory, Matt’s weblog appears to be a collection of posts; to a computer program trained to juggle posts into interesting other things, Matt’s weblog appears to be a mass of amorphous text.

Who cares?

Well, on a personal, practical level, people like Steven and I do because we don’t read weblogs in a web browser, we read them in a specialized tool called a newsreader that eats up the RSS versions of weblogs, and presents them in a structured, useful, centralized fashion.

Other people use RSS versions of weblogs to feed news aggregators, like Radio UserLand, which allows them not only to read weblogs in one place, but also to easily comment on what they read, and to link back to the original post on the original weblog.

Then there are tools like Feedster and Technorati and Weblogs.com that read in the RSS versions of weblogs and do interesting things with them.

Weblogs.com is a constantly updated list of new posts, on thousands of weblogs around the world. It is, in a sense, the heartbeat of the blog universe.

Technorati takes the RSS versions of weblogs and automatically determines the relationships between posts from different blogs, and thus the relationships between blogs, and makes this information available in a variety of formats. It’s a excellent tool for exploring the social life of the blogosphere.

Feedster is a blog search engine. It slurps in the RSS versions of thousands of weblog posts and makes them keyword searchable, Google-style. For example, here’s a Feedster search for ‘Zap Your PRAM’ that shows references to the Zap Your PRAM conference from all over the blogosphere.

And those are only three tools of hundreds.

When you blog using a tool that doesn’t support RSS, your words are left out of the blogosphere. Indeed there are some who would say that these days if you blog without RSS, you’re not actually blogging at all.

Whether that is true or not, it remains that RSS affords the opportunity to have your words participate in a social system rather than simply sitting motionless on an isolated web page.

In other words, RSS-free blogging is kind of like masturbation, while blogging with RSS is like group sex. Or, at the very least, sex with an interesting rotating collection of partners.

I recommend it.

I am, by all measurements, a bad photographer. Which is more about not being a good photographer than about having some inherent inability to take good looking photographs.

I’ve decided that I should get better.

Here’s what I’ve learned to date:

• Symmetry is over-valued; more often than not, asymmetrically composed photos look better. This goes against my better judgment, but it’s true.
• The camera is not you. In other words, the process of taking a photo is not the process of simply recording what your eye sees. This was a big lesson for me. Think of the camera as a complicated paint brush.
• Understanding how light works is important. Common sense, this one. But I have no understanding of light, and this is crippling me. I need to learn.
• Early morning and late in the day are good times to take pictures. This is contrary to what I would think, as these are times of “low light.” But the pictures look better. Perhaps for the same reason that cinematographers talk about the “golden hour” at the end of the day? See these examples by Steven.
• Taking pictures of faces head-on makes people look flat. I learned this from The New Yorker, in an article on film.
• Photos that are out of focus when large can look pretty good when digitally shrunk. The photo of me on this page was horribly out of focus full-size, and I would have thrown it out but for the fact that I mistakenly downsized it, and it came out looking very interesting. Go figure.

More as I learn.

Hi there new webloggers.

I’m speaking here of people like Rob, Cynthia, Matt and Nils.

I have a humble request for you from the blog intelligentsia: please stop using blogspot to host your blogs. Yes, it’s free, and easy. And free.

But it is also (a) ugly and (b) inflexible and (c) unlikely to be of much use to you as you want to expand the breadth of your blog and (d) doesn’t support the cool web standards like RSS and FOAF and Trackback that we in the blog intelligentsia obsess over.

My suggestion? Use TypePad. It suffers from none of the above, and while it’s not free, it’s only $4.95 a month for basic service, which is very, very cheap.

You will get a more beautiful, flexible, cool, standards-rich weblog, with lots of room for expansion. You’ll also be eligible for much better seating at the meetings of the weblogger elite.

There’s a free 30-day trial of TypePad from their website.

Disclaimer: I have no relationship with TypePad, other than a respect for their products. I don’t use TypePad myself, preferring to use a less-capable, theoretically more flexible homebrew system that I’ve grown addicted to. But people who I know and respect are big TypePad fans. Should the sarcasm be lost on anyone: there is no weblog intelligentsia.

In the continuing drive to understand more about the traffic to this website — who’s reading, how often, and where from — I’ve started to send out (and read back) a cookie called RealPerson. Because things like Google spiders, and other automated robots [probably] don’t support cookies, this will allow me to separate the wheat of real people from the chafe of the automated. The cookie is anonymous: it’s just a unique 13-digit number. Once I’ve developed enough of a log to draw some conclusions, I’ll post the results.

Ever-capable organizer Will Pate has set up a Weblogger Meetup for this Thursday, Nov. 13 at 1:00 p.m. at the Formosa Tea House. Here’s a handy iCal event for you of the Macintized that want to attend (who knows, it may work in Outlook too!); click the link and the event should appear on your iCal schedule for Thursday.

The movie Runaway Jury has an interesting, capable cast, and a clever, intriguing plot. The first act is well constructed, the second act is occasionally thrilling, and then

Aeroplan miles are generally considered, in my little circle, akin to gold. We may snicker at the lowly collectors of Club Z, Airmiles and Esso Extra points, but Aeroplan miles — that’s the real stuff.

I don’t believe my friend Don the Dentist has paid for an airline ticket in 10 years: he just puts the 45 gallon drums of dental amalgam on his Aerogold Visa, and, blamo, gets enough points to fly himself and his burgeoning family to Katmandu and back. Or at least to LA.

So after years of being a casual collector of Aeroplan miles here — 500 here, 500 there — I decided to jump in with both feet, bite the $150 bullet of the yearly card fee, and get Aerogolded. Of course my purchasing is limited, mostly to the occasional fountain pen ink cartridge and the odd floppy disk, so my accumulation isn’t anywhere near that of those that buy MRI’s and Jeep CJ’s on their card. But I’m clocking in about 2000 a month these days, and my lifetime, as-yet-to-be-redeemed Aeroplan mileage total is about to hit 100,000.

So you think I would excited to be entering a “world filled with an ever-expanding array of opportunities” (says Aeroplan).

But I am not.

Aeroplan reality, at least for my travel planning habits, is far less alluring than Aeroplan dreams.

Let’s say, for example, that Oliver and I want to go to New York City next week (a modest dream, but a dream nonetheless). We want to leave on Friday, and come back on Monday.

Well, first off, there are no Aeroplan seats available for a Friday-Monday trip. The best they can offer is a Tuesday departure and Friday return. Fair enough.

The Tuesday departure is reasonable: leave Charlottetown at 4:35 in the afternoon, arrive La Guardia, via Montreal, at ten minutes to nine that night.

But the Friday return leaves New York City at 7:50 a.m., flies to Ottawa for a 9:11 a.m. arrival. Then there’s a three hour wait in Ottawa for a noon flight to Halifax. Then one is forced to overnight in Halifax, returning to Charlottetown at 8:20 a.m. the next morning. That makes it a 24 hour trip from airport to airport.

The stuff that dreams are made of?

But perhaps my plans are too soon: maybe it’s unreasonable to dream so quickly? So I check for a Friday-Monday trip in January.

For a mid-January weekend in New York, Aeroplan’s availability would have us leaving Charlottetown at 7:40 p.m., arriving in Halifax shortly after 8:00 p.m. Then — sheesh! — overnighting in Halifax and leaving Halifax for Montreal the next day at 4:00 p.m.. Final arrival in New York City is ten minutes to seven. Making it another 24 hours journey.

And that’s not all: other routings, for other dates, have us landing at JFK and leaving from Westchester County Airport, which is 27 miles from New York City.

Obviously my dreams and Air Canada’s dreams a different.

Makes me realize why Aeroplan’s competitors are so intent on advertising their “fly any time on any flight” policies.

Buzz discovered Stan Rogers in Halifax.