Friday, June 04, 2004

A proposed clarification for the RSS 2.0 spec is ready for review. If there aren't any deal-stoppers, we'll make the changes early next week. Thanks to Nick Bradbury for help with the encoding examples and to Brent Simmons, Greg Reinacker, Jake Savin, Dare Obasanjo and Matt Mullenweg for help working out this proposed clarification. 

News.Com: "Search giant Google, which is building up its Web-based messaging services, has quietly acquired an e-mail software company." 

InfoWorld: "Contrary to published reports, Sun Microsystems Inc. has not made a decision as to whether or not to release its Java platform under an open source software license, company executives said on Friday." 

Rob Fahrni misses the Scripting News cactus. "When I saw this picture, from your drive across the country, I knew it was the perfect place!" 

The W3C made a pitch for Atom, but according to Matt May "we generally failed to, as they say, win hearts and minds." If Atom turns them down, as it appears they will, the W3C can start with RSS, which has a much larger installed base, is better-known and has a five-year head-start. It's the front-runner by a wide margin. Anyway, I'm still in Boston through the end of the month, which is right down the street from the W3C. They might want to try to talk with me about this. I have strong opinions, true, but I don't bite.  

If you want the W3C to help RSS, send me an email, and let me know if it's okay to publish it. Not sure exactly what I can do with the emails, but it couldn't hurt. Be sure to say what your interest is, if you work at a tech company, are a blogger, publisher, tool or aggregator developer, or are a user of any or all of the above.  

Comments I've received, in reverse-chronologic order. 

Don Park thinks RSS at the W3C makes sense. 

OJR: "I haven't been to the New York Times home page in years and yet I read 20 articles a day in the New York Times," 

Wired: "I'm amazed that this patent was filed so late and was approved. It's a double-click."  

The Demo: "On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962." 

7/24/00: "Imagine if you couldn't write a story because Dean Koontz had already written it. What if the idea were as basic as Boy Meets Girl? That's what's going on in another creative space, software." 

We talked about the Really Simple Syndication site at last night's meeting at Berkman. We're going start a project to create a simple catalog, with brief descriptions, of all the aggregators. Lisa Williams and Shimon Rura are going to work with me on this. 

We won't have a meeting next Thursday, June 10, because it's commencement day at Harvard.