Calendaring in RSS
Jon Udell's post on calendaring services and Dare Obasanjo's followup. Jon mentions RSS as a vector for this information, my experience from creating an RSS feed from Richard Thompson's tour dates page has been that standard RSS really doesn't fit this application well. True, with the feed I created, you get Richard Thompson's upcoming tour dates delivered in your aggregator. But what you really want is an element telling you when the event is occurring, not a pubDate. I'm sure there's some iCal based extension for RS out there, but notably, Eventful's RSS feeds and Upcoming's RSS feeds don't use anything of the kind. Eventful simply uses dc:date to indicate the date of the event, which is probably more appropriate for this application. The thing is, lacking some value-add, you may as well advertise on Craigslist - at least that's free, and has a pretty good categorization scheme to boot.
In Dare's comments, someone mentions Evite as a possible platform here. I think Evite is totally the wrong thing for what Jon's talking about. Evite is all about organizing invitation-only, private events, which is fine, but antithetical to the idea of getting as many people as possible to know about your event.
My wife subscribed to a website called cruisinkids.com (now a parked domain) a couple years ago that advertised events for kids & families. The site was subscription based, some nominal fee like $1.25 per month, and it actually made money as a 2 person company, except that the owners lost interest in running the business. My wife would religiously check the site for things to do with our daughter, though. There's definitely a set of use cases out there that people haven't explored.
— Gordon Weakliem at permanent link
The Wizard War
I've nearly finished R.V. Jones' The Wizard War: British scientific intelligence, 1939-1945 a really excellent book on the intelligence side of the European Theater in World War II. It was really eye-opening; R.V. Jones' initial claim to fame was figuring out how the Luftwaffe was able to accurately bomb British targets, even with strict blackouts; he discovered that the Germans had been navigating by radio beams; a fact that I was totally unaware of. The most interesting part of the book was Jones' views on engineering and organizational aspects of the intelligence war. A couple of choice quotes:
I had come to have a 'feel' for the way the Germans did things. They would take simple ideas, and put them straight into practice no matter what technical effort was involved, because they had a far greater command of precision engineering than we had... When we contemplated a development we would take the simple idea, look for the technical snags in the way of its realization, and think of ways of getting round them without having to go to the trouble of great precision of design or workmanship. ...as it turned out in the War, the advantage in the end lay with us, because while the German equipment was technically very good, it was also less adaptable, and we could more easily change ours to meet a new situation.
A little later, Jones mentions that the Germans had allocated personnel such that Radar operators tended to be very low skilled personnel, while the British often had highly skilled personnel in those positions. This had two effects; first, the German equipment had to be absolutely foolproof, because the operators weren't competent to perform their own repairs, and second, there were a number of important intelligence breakthroughs that came about because of sharp observation and good problem solving on the part of the British operators. Jones also mentions at the end of the book that the Germans generally formed committees of inquiry to develop countermeasures to British attacks, but "committees were slower and less responsive than individuals, especially when the latter were allowed to work and build up experience over several years..."
Another fundamental difficulty in Intelligence organization is that the collators have the more responsible task in that they must direct the collecting services, if only because the collators alone see the whole picture... At the same time the collectors often have the more difficult task, and their work is the more fundamental.
Here, he was quoting his own letter protesting the postwar reorganization of British Intelligence, but it sounds particularly damning in light of what has come out of the post 9/11 investigations into US Intelligence; where analysis and operations were often at odds with each other. In 1945, Jones argued for a strong central authority to coordinate both ends.