TypePad goes live and it will soon be time to fish or cut bait. Will it be TypePad, Radio Userland, or both? I’ve been part of the TypePad beta over the past month, and it has been a very pleasant experience. I would not hesitate to recommend TypePad.

TypePad has some features that Radio lacks. It was nice to be able to create an extended post rather than my standard hack of an excerpt on my home weblog pointing to a full post in the software category. And since I tend to ruminate over my postings for a bit, I liked how TypePad let me control the time associated with my post. And while I didn’t have any problems with TypePad, I did have some questions and it was good to have an infrastructure for help tickets.

But I’ve grown accustomed to Radio Userland. I like having a local system. The Radio news reader is still my favorite. And it’s a real pain to move a weblog. So right now, I’m leaning towards staying put. I think the next move for Take the First Step will be when I get my own domain name. Now if I could only snag a good name.

I’m running a bit behind the times, so excuse my belated congratulations to Lance Armstrong and the US Postal team for it’s 5th consecutive Tour de France win. I thought Lance was done when he showed weakness on l’Alpe d’Huez. But he proved that he was made of tougher stuff and rallied to a fine win. Lance will return next year in a quest for six, but what happens to US Postal when Lance retires?

Many think that US Postal shouldn’t sponsor a bicycle team. I disagree – I think that it has been an effective advertising tool. But I also think that Lance Armstrong, as both an American and a cancer survivor, is a major part of that effectiveness. How effective will the advertising be without Lance?

USPS desparately needs to find a successor to Lance. I think that he needs to be an American and he needs to be a threat to win the Tour. Unfortunately, I don’t think there are any qualified candidates. And I doubt that they will have more than two years to find one before the budget is dramatically slashed.

I’ve been predicting the conversion of newsletters from email to RSS for a while now, so it feels good to be proven correct. The free version of This is True is now available via RSS:

By using a special reader, you can get regular information – including news and newsletter subscriptions – from multiple web sites, all in one place. No more running from site to site to see if there are updates you are interested in. This is True’s free edition is now available by RSS feed. …

There’s much more info coming, but for now here are some places to get you started (as always, outside links open in a new window):

• If you use MS Outlook (not Outlook Express) an excellent integrated reader is [News Gator][3]
• A web-based aggregator: [Meercat][4]
• A stand-alone program for Windows: [Headline Viewer][5]. Others include [NewzCrawler][6], [KlipFolio][7], and [FeedDemon][8] (still in beta)
• A stand-alone progrom for Macintosh (OS-X): [NetNewsWire][9]
• For an interesting tutorial (mainly targeting publishers), see [this page][10].

We’ve all heard the sports bromide play to win. So it’s quite interesting that scientists say that managers, coaches and players are too cautious for their own good. It seems that their focus on the worst-case scenario prevents them from following the optimum strategy - fear of failure trumps cold logic.

Contrast that with Silicon Valley - the characteristic that is hardest to duplicate is it’s acceptance of failure. A stint at a failed company is a black mark in most places. In Silicon Valley, it’s a degree from the school of hard knocks.

My RSS feeds contain the full text of Take the First Step. I occasionally provide an excerpt on the main feed, but I always provide the full text in the appropriate category (Software and Sports). This is the right thing for me - the content is my brand.

Presentation is part of the brand for many of us, and Zeldman carries the flag for those who like to see our writing in its visual context. He hand rolls his feed to support his brand. But don’t try to extend your presentational brand into my news reader and expect me to be happy about it.

First of all, I like my text black on white and I find a lot of weblogs hard to read because of their color choices. I could put together a local style sheet. But I like to think that people have a good reason for their style sheet choices. And I prefer to respect those choices (but if I could apply style sheets on a site by site basis, then all bets are off).

And Second, my news reader is currently presents up to 100 RSS items on a single page. Even if it were possible to present each item with a unique style, I wouldn’t want to look at it. And aside from that, are you really willing to test your style selections on all the popular rendering engines?

If your web site is part of your brand, then use your RSS feed to drive traffic back to it. But don’t expect to project your web site presentation back into my news reader. Because it’s probably not going to work. And if it does work, then I’m probably going to unsubscribe.

The new RSS feeds from InfoWorld are looking good. They now provide a much better summary of the article by including the first paragraph of the article. Now, some would argue that the feed should provide the full article text in exchange for any ads, but I think that underestimates the excerpt value. Because they tell me to ignore InfoWorld much more often then they tell me to pay attention. And I’m willing to trade an ad in my feed for that. Hmmm, no ads today - did InfoWorld drop the RSS ad idea while I wasn’t paying attention?

Plus, I think that it’s only a matter of time before someone adds predictive capability to a newsreader to pre-fetch articles that you’re likely to select. Then we could head off on a plane or train with a stack of bits to read. And why not mark an article to fetch once a network connection is available? On the way in, you could mark articles to read on the way back. For all the promise of Always On, the reality is Always drifting between On and Off - RSS newsreaders should reflect that reality.

And why don’t more newsreaders download in the background? I’d much rather continue consuming my feed rather than waiting for an article to load - one of the big pluses of a web-based newsreader like Radio Userland in a tab-cabable browser.

Maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me that John Robb’s missing weblog is not really about control. It’s really about the blurring of the lines between our Corporate and our Personal Identities. We don’t expect to keep our email addresses when we leave a company, why would we expect to keep a corporate supplied weblog?

If UserLand were to be acquired by another company, then it’s conceivable that we might someday see Scripting News sundered from Dave Winer. I’m sure that Dave would try to negotiate ownership of Scripting News as part of any acquistion. But I have to think that Scripting News also represents a significant corporate asset and it might not be on the table.

So the moral is to keep cognizant of corporate identity and assets vs personal identity and assets. Because they’re not hard to keep separate if you start out that way. But once they mingle, corporate will win almost every time.

RSS 2.0 has been rejuvenated - both the Triumvirate and the SSF-DEV are hard at work. And as I’ve been thinking about RSS, I think that we need to emphasize RSS as an envelope, not a format.

Because the value of the envelope lies in the package that it delivers. It liberates us from delivery concerns and focuses our thoughts on the package. And it forces us to recognize that the envelope can have different meanings for different packages.

We need to leave some wiggle room for packages to interpret the standard flexibly. And while it would be nice to nail down the guid, we don’t really want to shackle all possible packages with our existing weblog/aggregator implemenation baggage.

So please distinguish between what the standard wants, and how application domains interpret.

Right now, I’m trying out the RSS capability inside OddPost. If I subscribe, then OddPost would become the third aggregator that I’ve purchased (joining Radio UserLand and NewsGator).

The appeal of OddPost is that it makes RSS available via an IMAP server, providing a single point to read and archive RSS. I’m also lobbying FastMail (my IMAP email provider) to provide an equivalent capability and looking at scripting Outlook and NewsGator. And since I’m already at “Good Enough”, do nothing is always a leading contender. We’ll see what happens.

At the start of this Tour de France, Lance Armstrong was the clear favorite. But Jan Ullrich is breathing down his neck, just 15 seconds back after 13 stages. There’s a lot of racing to be done before a winner is crowned in Paris, but I think that it is interesting just how quickly cracks can appear in the Tour de France.

We’ve seen it before. Miguel Indurain was favored to win a 6th consecutive tour in 1996, only to finish 11th. Big Mig turned 32 during the ‘96 tour – Lance turns 32 this September. The conventional wisdom is that skill and guile allow athletes to compensate for the loss of physical ability in the early 30’s. But perhaps the sheer physicality required by the tour trumps conventional wisdom.