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About a month ago the Des Moines Business Record published an article called Luring IT Workers, by Jason Hancock. The jist of the article was the fact that Iowa’s growing IT industry does not have enough labor to fulfill IT needs. It’s a simple supply and demand issue. There are several reasons why - of which many can be associated to the so-called “Brain-drain” that Iowa suffers. That is - we lose our best and brightest because they want to get out of Iowa and head to a coast. I used to be the same way until I decided to stay.

Aside from the fact that we lose our young talented IT professionals because they want to get out of Iowa - they could be leaving because we have no cool jobs in Iowa.

In order to validate my thoughts I decided to peruze job boards for Des Moines, IA and compare them to their counterparts in Seattle or Silicon Valley. The differences, other than a major pay increase on the coasts, are the jobs there are for cool, innovative, cutting-edge companies - not insurance companies.

The jobs are for creating rich internet applications, mobile applications, RSS based applications, video and blogging sites, new media, etc. They are not for doing code-monkey work like sitting in a cubicle all day heads down staring at COBOL code for the local insurance company - making decent money but never doing anything fun with your skills.

So the game plan should be to foster an entrepreneurial technology landscape to make it easy for cool startups to form. Once those cool startups form there will be plenty of cool jobs. Once there are plenty of cool jobs we’ll start seeing less people go to those jobs and more people coming to them.

That’s my two cents…

Tags: Iowa, Des Moines, Jobs, IT

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U of L circulated a memo on the issue from Jeramy Michiaels, the NCAA’s manager of broadcasting, before Friday’s first super-regional game. It said blogs are considered a “live representation of the game” and that any blog containing action photos or game reports would be prohibited.

“In essence, no blog entries are permitted between the first pitch and the final out of each game,” the memo said.

This is a very interesting story out of Louisville, KY and could very well serve as some precedent. Thoughts?

I agree with the Courier-Journal that indeed this is absurd. I could not put it better than they:

“It’s a real question that we’re being deprived of our right to report within the First Amendment from a public facility,” said Jon L. Fleischaker, the newspaper’s attorney.

“Once a player hits a home run, that’s a fact. It’s on TV. Everybody sees it. (The NCAA) can’t copyright that fact. The blog wasn’t a simulcast or a recreation of the game. It was an analysis.”

I’m sure we’ll hear commentary for the next several days regarding this subject.

from courier-journal’s rich bozich - via techdirt

Tags: Courier-Journal, Blogging, Ejection, NCAA

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Items are the next part of your RSS feed that we will discuss. Items are contained within channels in your feed. A valid feed can have as many items as you would like although the standard is approximately 10-20 items in a feed.

An item represents an individual blog post, article, etc in an RSS feed. One of the reasons being an RSS developer is hard is that all elements in a title are optional. These elements include author, category, comments, description, enclosure, guid, link, pubDate, source, and title, among others. The only requirement for a valid RSS feed is that an item contain either a title or description.

The title element is very straightforward as it simply provides a headline for the item. Here is an example from a recent post from Mitch Matthews.

<title>What was one of the most memorable TV show finales?</title>

(By the way the answer is Seinfeld)

Keep in mind titles and descriptions both have to adhere to standard character data.

Descriptions are also pretty easy but are often misused. Descriptions hold an item’s full content or a summary of the item’s contents. Descriptions must be properly encoded as well which is accomplished by either using HTML entitites or CDATA tags. You generally do not have to worry about this because a good publishing application will take care of character encoding for you.

Here is a properly encoded description from Mike Wagner’s blog

<description><![CDATA[You’re a hotel manager and you just read my last post, “But You Promised…!” Suddenly you get this sinking feeling, “I wonder if this was MY hotel.” In a bold move you eMail me to find out the name and location of the hotel. Seeing this as a legitimate request, I write back and disclose the [...]]]></description>

What’s in your RSS feed? (series)
The Title
The Description
The Link
Optional Channel Elements

Tags: RSS, Tutorial

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While reading Guy Kawasaki’s interview with Jeffrey Kalmikoff (chief creative officer at threadless) one section jumped out at me. When asked if threadless was a web 2.0 company he responded

… “I hesitate to call ourselves a “web 2.0” company because I really hate that term. I don’t understand why people feel the need to categorize the web into versions. It’s easier to think of it as what’s new. Innovation doesn’t happen in planned, organized, measured steps that you can attach segmented numbering systems to. It just happens. Nobody called automobiles “car 2.0” when the automatic transmission was invented. It was simply easier to use.” …

I couldn’t agree more.

If you are not familiar with the threadless business model than, well, you should be.

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There are several optional elements in the channel so I’ll reference a few of the more popular ones.

The first is the generator element. This element simply tells the aggregator or feed reader what generated the RSS feed, ie Wordpress, Typepad, etc.

The image element is one of my favorite as it allows you to insert a logo into your feed that shows up in popular feed readers and aggregators.

The language element identifies which language the feed is in. If you do use the language element (which is often supplied by the publishing platform) you must adhere to standard RSS language codes.

If you want to be friendly to to RSS developers it’s always nice to include either the lastBuildDate or pubDate elements for a channel. These elements indicate the last time the feed was updated. As I’ve discussed before this is a very valuable tool for RSS readers to know when a feed was updated so the machine knows whether there are new items in the feed without checking each post individually.

The rating element helps to describe the nature of the content in the feed. For instance, iTunes uses this to determine which podcasts contain content that explicit - much like video games and movies. Although this is not that important of an element for the ways RSS is used today in the future it could provide a lot of value for filtering content.

The ttl element is another valuable element I recommend including in your feed (if you have a choice). Basically it tells aggregators and feed readers how many minutes to wait until the feed should be checked again for more content. Unfortunately for us RSS developers it, like lastBuildDate, are available in less than half of RSS feeds.

The copyright element simply provides a human readable copyright that applies to the feed and the content of the feed. It acts in the same way as any other copyright statement on other mediums. If you are lacking this element your content is still protected under its originating copyright (if one exists).

And that wraps up what I think are important channel elements. Next week we’ll move on to items - which are how posts are included in an RSS feed.

The RSS Board recently released some statistics regarding element usage in RSS feeds. If you are curious, check it out. If you are an RSS developer it should be quite important to you.

What’s in your RSS feed? (series)
The Title
The Description
The Link

Tags: RSS, Tutorial

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