Thursday, June 10, 2004

BBC: "Ray Charles has died in Los Angeles aged 73." 

Microsoft is publishing security alerts via RSS 2.0. It's the perfect time to do this, the email channels are clogged, and the people who need to be alerted of security issues are exactly the kind of people who, in 2004, are likely to use an aggregator. There are still a few glitches to work out, but the feed is in pretty good shape, and can probably be used in most aggregators. Computerworld and Insecure.Org also have security feeds, providing triangulation. 

Something is not quite right when people say "RSS is not going away anytime soon" and then say they want peace not war. As a longtime sports fan, I believe the time to declare victory is after you win, and then be humble, because your challenger is waiting in the wings (wait till next year, they say as you pour the champagne). My old friend Jean-Louis Gassee, the genius of sexual metaphor, calls this tactic, which is common among adolescent males and Silicon Valley tech companies, premature congratulation. It's bad practice. Be humble. If you like Atom, say you like Atom, no problem with that. But if you dis the format that created the market that you hope to dominate, well, as Mrs Landingham says, I don't even want to know you. 

I keep forgetting to say who my favorite West Wing character is. My favorite Simpsons character is Grandpa, which shows that sometimes my favorite isn't one of the stars. And so it is with TWW. My favorite is Leo McGarry's assistant, Margaret. She gets the best lines. She's a fanatic, but really smart. And a total team player. A red-headed fox. Crazy and funny. Joined at the hip with Leo. Sassy. 

Slashdot post on Google and RSS. 

Ed Brill: E-mail vs RSS. 

RSS2WAP does what its name says. 

Travelocity isn't finished haunting me. 

Marc Andreessen: "First it was email, then web, then IM, then Napster/ Kazaa, then Apple iChat, now RSS. One thing after another." 

A wireless iPod (speculation) and a wireless projector (not). 

Tony Perkins and Dan Gillmor will lead a discussion about weblogs and social networks at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley, June 17, 6PM. 

Something troubling about this post from Jeff Veen, a former colleague at Wired. He's glad to have an intermediary to sort out all the weird formats showing up on his RSS desktop. "Leave the hard stuff to someone else," says Jeff. "It wasn't supposed to be hard stuff," say I. It was supposed to be transparently simple. We're in a bad place, because after the next level of hard stuff it won't be possible for an intermediary to sort it out. Then we'll bemoan the lack of support of "standards" but the problems won't get solved, and eventually we'll give up and move on. Why we can't learn from the mistakes of the past is the mystery of the human hive. 

Last night: "The aggregator developer community has embraced Atom. At this point Google could afford to concede the point, they've managed to get what they probably wanted, a third major syndication format." 

Wired: "TV watchers can now connect their basic TiVo Series2 DVR to a home network and share content between two or more TiVo boxes in the same household, schedule recordings using the Internet, play music and view digital photos -- all features previously available with the company's home media option for an added fee." 

What I like about this piece is the author's unabashed advocacy of RSS. We tend to tiptoe in the RSS community, but what's wrong with saying what you think? I got involved in this stuff because I wanted a more decentralized system for moving information, ideas, and opinions around the Internet. So let the ideas flow.  

As predicted by the weather guys, the heat wave has broken. It's 72 degress outside and the temperature is falling. I don't have an indoor thermometer, but I would wager it's still in the low 90s, 100 percent humidity. Not great sleeping weather. But relief is on the way. Whew. After listening to the latest Gillmor Gang radio show last night, I had low-grade nightmares about the lies enterprise software companies tell their customers, and the poor lot of a tech analyst in the early 21st century. What you have to say to earn a buck. Oh the humanity.