Tuesday, June 08, 2004

Howard Rheingold gave a talk at Berkman today. Approx 25MB. 

David Weinberger talked about his next book. Approx 25MB. 

Sun has an excellent RSS 2.0 feed for their group blog. Nice use of the source element. 

My webcam is at Berkman today. We're between meetings. At 4PM the room should fill up again, providing more interesting distractions for the terminally bored. 

Great picture of Jim Moore and David Weinberger. 

TDavid: AmphetaDesk. 

After Newsweek's RSS feeds come online, God is the next one to pop. 

Tim Bray invokes Godwin's Law. "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." 

Stonyfield Farm blog. "A chance for you to look inside Stonyfield and get to know us, and us to know you." 

eBay is the latest tech giant to support RSS 2.0. The announcement comes from their senior manager of developer relations, Jeff McManus. There's a feed for special offers and announcements, and one for system status messages. Thanks to Micah Alpern for the pointer. Internet News has the story too. 

Bernie Goldbach: Opera with RSS. 

MacWorld: How AirTunes Works. 

Ray Daly: FeedDemon and Bloglines. 

Roger Benningfield: Newzcrawler vs FeedDemon. 

Morgan Pugh: FeedDemon. 

Wired: "From fancy hotels to fast-food joints, the number of venues offering high-speed wireless Internet access is expected to grow at a heady clip this year. But industry analysts aren't expecting laptop users and their credit cards to follow." 

Boston's Logan Airport now has wireless. "The Logan Wi-Fi system is available in nearly all public areas of Terminals B, C, D & E." $7.95 for 24 hours. 

It's in the low 50s this morning, as it has been all spring, but later today a heat wave is sweeping into the Boston area, with highs in the 90s. Oh my god. I'm totally not ready for this. I'll be indoors in air conditioning all day at Berkman, listening to Howard Rheingold, David Weinberger and Mary Rundle. I may record the Rheingold talk, if I am permitted to do so.  

Standards nazis 

When we were developing SOAP in 1998 and 1999, another group was working on WebDAV. SOAP was higher level, you could create a toolkit that mapped SOAP calls on the procedure-calling mechanism in any scripting system. I never understood WebDAV, so I hired a smart young guy to implement it for UserLand (he works at IBM now). Never happened.

There were three groups at Microsoft, one working on WebDAV, another working with Allaire on WDDX, and a third working on SOAP. Anyway, if this were a horror movie, we'd say They're baaaaack, about the WebDAV folk. Amazingly, they're talking about retrofitting weblog APIs to be part of WebDAV. What an stunningly stupid step backwards.

Some corporate programmers are amazing that way, rapidly driving off the cliff to get off the high road and quickly get mired in the mud. Glad I'm not involved in that debate. Eventually even SOAP got mired, so we stuck with XML-RPC. Oh for the good old days, when we could ratify a standard proposed by Evan in a matter of hours. Look at all the overhead that's come into it. Blogging as a technical art, may almost be over, the standards nazis are taking over.