What is this blog?

Well, one purpose is to help promote Xenos, of course! If you haven’t seen Xenos yet, head over to the [metanews] website.

But more than that, I want to provide some dialog about the ideas that exist behind Xenos.

Most of those ideas are based on the early work of Douglas Engelbart. You can catch up on his thinking at bootstrap.org.

Briefly, Dr. Engelbart developed most of the fundamentals of modern computing during the 1960s, including the mouse, windowed displays and email. His underlying concerns, however, were with how humans use information, and how this could be enhanced — or in his terminology, “augmented”.

Xenos is the beginning of an effort to retrace some of Dr. Engelbart’s work. When he developed his systems, Dr. Engelbart had to envision, develop and use a very closed environment. Nowadays it is appropriate to look at developments, file formats and techniques already available “in the wild” and see how these can be reformed and augmented to match up with Dr Engelbart’s ideas.

For example, in the next blog entry, I write about the core basis to Xenos, which is the direct combination of RSS and OPML file formats to provide a powerful tool for sourcing, editing and publishing highly customized sets of information.

In addition to these Xenos-focused endeavors, I also intend to point to and discuss some of the better new information, thoughts and ideas about RSS that become available.