Rok Hrastnik’s RSS e-book: Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS is now available. If you’re looking for a single stop resource on the use of RSS in marketing and business, then this is for you.

I am pleased to say that my interview is one of the 33 included in the work. I’ll be expanding upon my interview in the coming days.

PS: I have declined to participate in the affiliate sales program for this e-book and I will receive no funds from the sales of Rok’s e-book.

RSS feeds are freely available. That doesn’t give you all rights to the content in those feeds. Please add context and attribution when incorporating items from RSS feeds in your weblog. Attribution via a title link to the author’s weblog is not enough - add enough context to identify it as another’s work.

Now I don’t want to put any words into Martin Schwimmer’s mouth, but I can’t help but wonder if this lies at the root of his request for Bloglines to remove his site from its service.

If you go to the Bloglines Blog Directory and search for ideoplex, then you’ll find that Bloglines hosts a copy of my weblog. Without sufficient context and attribution to make it clear that the author of the content has no relationship to the hosting service.

I make a full text RSS feed available because I want to reach the widest possible audience. I want full credit and recognition for my writing. I don’t think that we want a blogosphere where those two sentiments are in conflict.

After two weeks, I was finally able to score some unscented clay kitty litter. My [reluctantly] favored pet store conglomerate really needs to improve their not in time inventory system. The litter was delivered to the store this morning and I got the last 60 pounds around noon. Everyone else is out of luck.

I was this close to being an ex-customer. But the competing pet store conglomerate doesn’t even carry an unscented clay kitty litter. And a trial run with litter from my local grocery fell flat.

Seth Godin takes the blogosphere to task for mob justice:

One of the side effects of the massively many-to-many publishing model that is the blogosphere is the following math:

1. controversy is fun to write
2. controversy is fun to read
3. piling on is safe and fun
4. undoing 1, 2 and 3 is no fun, hard work and easy to avoid.

When I was a kid, there was a fair amount of mob justice. A bunch of kids would spread a rumour, a posse would appear, ask no questions, beat the crap out of you and move on.

What I find surprising his advice to keep your mouth shut and wait for it to blow over. One of the features of the internet is its permanence. And the mob posts will be there forever, waiting for the right search engine query.

I think you need to make your case permanent as well. That may prolong the current problem, but it will insure that the search engines will return your side of the story as well as theirs.

Today is the start of my third year on the Soap Box. Looking back, I think that my message of Take the First Step is as true now as ever. There is no secret to success in blogging. Just a bunch of people blogging one thing at a time.

My partner just ordered a iPod Shuffle. It joins the 1G iPod, iPod mini, Rio S30S, and Sony MZ-S1 already in our mobile music stable. The shuffle is compatible with our existing infrastructure and should eliminate the annoying silence when the buffer runs out during a workout.

The price was right. And while the feature set could be more robust, it appears to be an excellent complement to feature sets already provided by Apple’s iPod lineup. The same device from anyone else would have gotten the cold shoulder. But the iPod brand sealed the deal.

Steve Rubel is out and about evangelizing blogging and community marketing. He was in my neck of the woods today, and I dropped in to hear him speak on How Blogs Are Changing Public Relations - And How You Can Adapt to the Westchester/Fairfield Chapter of the PRSA.

I’m already one of the converted and my three sentence commentary goes like this:

• Your customers are talking about you.
• Do you know what they’re saying?
• Do you want to be part of the conversation?

Inexpensive hosting and internet search allow anyone to air their opinions and reach an audience. If you fail to monitor and engage your customers, then you are opening yourself up to be blind-sided.

Hmm, the new Mac mini may just be the headless Mac that I was hoping for. Unfortunately, I think that it’s actually too small. At that form factor, I don’t think there is much hope for either a GPU or CPU upgrade. Of course, at that price point I’m not sure that there is any market either.

Well, at least the Colts had to punt a few times this year. Broncos needed to establish a strong rushing game and keep the score close. They didn’t succeed on either count. I watched the entire, painful game; but it was over midway through the second quarter.

After last year’s debacle, the MasterMind set out to fix the secondary. Seems to me that he should have done something about the pass rush instead. Or he should have won enough games in the regular season to play this game at home. With three good receivers on a fast track, the only way for the Broncos to win was to keep Manning off the field or on his back. Now, it’s back to the drawing board.

As I was only a few blocks away, I stopped by the Manhattan Juan Valdez Cafe for a second visit. It seems to me that they still need to work on their institutional handbook - they were repeating orders rather than demonstrating a process for keeping the orders straight. Not a problem on a leisurely mid-afternoon, but a potential disaster during the morning rush.

On the coffee front, I have to say that I was pleased. But I still contend that the Juan Valdez Cafe needs to be more than just good coffee. It is the overall experience that we remember and the overall impression that brings us back. Once isolated good elements raise our expectations, it is important that nothing bring us down. Starbucks has taught me to expect a certain efficiency from my coffee shop. The Juan Valdez Cafe needs to step up to meet that bar.