I know that this blog is born with several original sins. Here is a not comprehensive list of them:

• the author is not named
• the author has no experience as a blogger or writer
• the author sometimes refers to an obscure project named Clipperz, but he gives no details about the project
• the author often says “we”, but it’s not clear who is in the Clipperz team
• the author’s mother tongue is not english
• …

We’ll mend most of these faults soon, but today I need to apologize with Davide Weinberger and Mark Fletcher. They were so kind to comment my previous post, here and here. But those comments were neglected and left behind in the moderation queue for days!

Those were actually the very first two comments ever posted to this blog!

The email alerts did not work and I did not bother to manually check the queue! Actually I never thought that my posts were interesting enough to deserve comments from brilliant and authoritative people like David and Mark … The Clipperz team was afraid of spammers, hence the moderation queue, but I think we will soon change the comment authentication process.

[David Weinberger] Master Clipperz, I understand that you don’t think HighBeam is particularly useful. Maybe it’s better for the sort of info I’m looking for. Or maybe I’m just easily impressed. Thank you for pointing to a bunch of places that are hugely valuable sources, too. And they don’t cost $100/yr, like HB. I hadn’t heard of Arvix and look forward to checking it out. And I like your idea of making it easier for posts to point to resources; IMO, HighBeam deserves credit for letting bloggers (with subscriptions) link to the full text of a HighBeam article.

David, you are right: Ebsco, Ingenta and the likes are extremely expensive compared to HighBeam. My hope is that HighBeam’s move toward the bloggers will lead to similar proposals from all the other database maintainers, both open and commercial. Can we do something to stir up a debate in the blogosphere about this topic?

[Mark Fletcher] We do listen, and what you’ve outlined sounds almost exactly like our Universal Inbox strategy. We want you to be able to aggregate any kind of information within Bloglines. We’ve only just started that, with the recent additions of package tracking and weather forecasts within Bloglines. You should see what we have on the TODO list. :)

Mark, I would really like to see what you have in your ToDo list! ;-)