Sunday, July 11, 2004

Newsweek: "American counter-terrorism officials, citing what they call 'alarming' intelligence about a possible Qaeda strike inside the US this fall, are reviewing a proposal that could allow for the postponement of the November presidential election in the event of such an attack." 

Do you think we should give Bush the power to postpone the election? 

Talking with Steve Gillmor this afternoon, he got on my case, again. Where are your audio blog posts, he wanted to know. I said there was a technical glitch, but I think I've solved it. So here's a new audio blog post, thanks to Steve for the motivation.  

VOA: "Bush has refused an invitation to speak at the annual convention of the United States' largest and oldest civil-rights group, the NAACP." 

It has been observed that if you start an open collaborative process to define a new XML format or protocol, given enough time, it will turn into SOAP 1.2.  

UCLA supports RSS. "The syndication of our headlines allows other websites to incorporate new alerts or announcements into their headlines without further work on their part." 

Highly recommend listening to the first 20 minutes of the Gillmor Gang interview with Brendan Eich, who's been working on browsers since the early days of Netscape. He illustrates how a user-oriented developer looks at the Web. I agree with everything Brendan says up to the point where he says RSS and HTML are orthogonal. Take another look, RSS wraps chunks of HTML with useful metadata. Anyway, I think what they're doing is good, and if they stick with it, Microsoft may pay attention at some point. With the Kooky Buddy stuff, it appears maybe they've loosened up. What would be the harm in working with Brendan? Could he be someone's kook? (In a nice way of course.) BTW, Brendan might get the persistent storage system he's looking for when Frontier goes open source, Murphy-willing, later this year. 

9/2/00: "To me, RSS is not just a syndication format, it's also a fork from the W3C process, a chance for XML to be widely adopted while the minds of the W3C working groups work out details of a network that will likely not be built." BTW, this wasn't just my philosophy, it was also Netscape's. They were tired of all the wrangling on the working groups and wanted to make software, without all the fuss. Reminded me a lot of the stuff Brendan said in the interview above. 

Metafilter: MP3 Blog Roundup. 

NY Times: "Can a quick release and a team of lawyers keep Fox from trying to shut down Robert Greenwald's new movie about Fox News?" 

Outfoxed examines "how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News, have been running a 'race to the bottom' in television news." 

Lessig on Outfoxed. "Celebrate the freedom it represents."