You can now put two spaces between sentences with Movable Type using a plugin by Kelsey Group, thanks to a suggestion by Scott Johnson.

Here are some use cases for Syndicated Images:

• News Images – news organizations have hundreds of thousands professional photographers around the world.  As news happens, bloggers will talk about them and photos taken by the photographers will help spice up those posts.  Throw in millions of amateur photographers and you got enough chaos to drive major market shifting events.
• Porn Images – porn businesses and enthusiasts (?!?) joins the blogspace.  Replace all those free thumbnail websites causing popup hell with image syndication.  Keep track of your favorite porn stars by subscribing to their image feed.
• Space Images – NASA and observatories can syndicate images taken by all those fancy telescopes for consumption by space enthusiasts.
• Style Images – designers and clothing industry can distribute images of latest design and fashion.  Wanna keep track of latest in bikini?  Kiss my RSS.
• TV Images – keep track of your favorite TV shows by subscribing to image feeds of memorable moments, upcoming episodes, and behind-the-stage images.
• Food Images – we got zillions of restaurants, cooks, moms, and food enthusiasts.  When they talk about food in their blogs, they will want pictures.  I want a picture of Kimchee!
• Talent Images – actors, models, talent agencies can provide feeds of their latest portfolio and clients.
• Destination Images – what better way to publicize your hole in the wall tourist spot than with syndicated images?  Hand your bellboy a digital camera and feed images of incoming guests.  Oops, she is not your wife, monsieur?

I could go on and on, but I gotta make a living.

Scott Johnson asked me to expand on my Blog Inline Image Service idea so here is the result of a cup of coffee.  There are two parts to the idea:

1. Syndicated Images – Allow people and organizations to syndicate images along with associated title, link, and description.  RSS already has <image> tag used for channel image, so all we have to do is add an attribute to distinguish non-channel images and allow multiple <image> inside <channel>.  I would also add a child element for specifying suggested use (i.e. icon, blah, blah).
2. Blog Inline Image Service – Integrate blogging tools with web services that provide content-related images to be inlined into weblog posts.  The idea is to make it really easy for bloggers to add images to posts by searching image database with words and phrases extracted directly or indirectly (by association) from the post content or the channel title and description.

Tie two parts together and you got something neat.  Imagine writing a post about Bill Gate and being presented with a selection of Bill Gate pictures including one taken this morning by himself.  Cool!

It would be cool to have an online service that integrates with blogging software to provide small images to be inlined in blog posts.  When a post is made, blogging software shows a small selection (based on the words and phrases of the post) of possible pictures to be inlined.  This service could be offered as a premium service for around $5-10 per month or so.  Just thinking out.

I have been looking for a Java RSS parser that can handle all variations of RSS without much luck.  Availability and quality of RSS parsers don't seem to match the current level of hype.  Most look like as if they were put together using glues and strings over a few hours.  Not much concerns over security either.  I wonder what percentage of RSS clients can be crashed just with bad RSS data?  Anyway, it looks as if I'll be writing a RSS library.

Robert Scoble pointed me to One Versus Two Spaces After a Period, a report by John S. Rhodes.  The reported enumerated several issues and concluded with the advice that only one space should follow the period.  I disagree for following reasons.

Proportional versus monospace fonts – while proportional fonts allows the eye to more easily identify the beginning of a new sentence, width of a single space in proportional fonts are generally narrower than the uppercase character used to start the new sentence.

Compuert versus typewriter fonts – Period character for computer fonts are much smaller than period character for typewriter.  For small computer fonts, typically used to display news articles or blog posts, a period is just a single pixel.  Width of the period is also much narrower than on typewriter, making the period difficult to see.

River of blank spots – River of blank spots do not appear in left justified text typically used for news articles.

Large font means larger spaces – I do agree that double spaces should not be used for text displayed in large fonts.  Sometimes we have no control over the font size, but we can usually assume a reasonable range of font sizes users are expected to view the content in and take appropriate actions.

Ultimately, I just like double spaces better than a single because I find it less disorienting in a long paragraph.  I can also more easily locate a paragraph.

"Collaxa" announced that they will be beta testing 2.0 version of Collaxa Orchestration Server privately.  As I mentioned before, these guys got it together when it comes to web service orchestration.  Send mail to Edwin Khodabakchian, CEO of Collaxa, if you are interested.  Tell Edwin Don sent ya to get a free toaster.  Just kidding.

Apparently, its not the UserLand Radio's code that is preserving the extra space.  Its Microsoft's HTML editor control used by UserLand Radio.  Oops.  I still love it and think more web sites and tools should do the same.  It makes text so much more readable.  Unfortunately, not everyone agrees.  Practically every site I visit uses only one space to separate sentences.  I suspect this is one of the reasons why studies have showed that long paragraphs tend to make eyes wander after a sentence or two.

Have you noticed that spaces between sentences are much narrower on the Web? Where there should be enough room for two spaces, there is only one space for majority of the web pages (I wouldn't be surprised if its 99%). This is due to a quirky rule in the HTML syntax that truncates contiguous whitespaces into a single space.

What amazes me is that most people don't notice or complain about it. If this happened in the real world, there would have been an uproar well before Evening Edition. My guess is that people are more willing to adapt in new environment.

By the way, UserLand Radio does put an extra space between sentences.  Above two paragraphs were handcoded in HTML to show how bad it would have been.  Great job, Dave!

Microsoft's XDocs sounds very similar to the product I have been building, a bummer.  Mine has other features, but XDocs will likely be bundled with Office, a real bummer.

Maybe I'll release mine on the same day as XDocs to show how Microsoft Office monopoly kills competition.  Maybe I'll release mine as freeware to show how free software kills value.

Luckily, XDocs won't be released until 2003 which means I have some room for manuever.  So there is an upside to FUD after all.