Sunday, November 20, 2005

Tomorrow morning, watch this space for a new namespace for RSS and OPML from a group of designers at an important company. I'm looking forward to hearing what people think, as we continue to move forward.  

In an email today, I wrote: "Why wait to anounce a consensus. That's always been the problem. I had my first meeting about identity in 1997. We haven't really gotten much further in eight years. The way to go forward is to stop planning on saying we agree, rather to start saying we agree." 

NY Times profile of Sidney Verba, the head of Harvard's library, working with Google. This is an example of the kind of communication Google itself should be doing, instead of pushing us around, talk plainly and truthfully. It's a complicated issue, and we're not stupid. It would be so easy to turn the naysayers into supporters, but Google lacks the respect to talk with us as if we're intelligent.  

Steve Gillmor: Time is on our side.  

Dowbrigade envisions a Time cover for 2006. 

This is why the death penalty is wrong, because we kill innocent people, in the name of justice.  

Lisa Williams: "I subscribe to hundreds of feeds, verging on 1,000. And I don't feel overwhelmed." 

Dare Obasanjo is considering reading list support for his aggregator. 

Like everyone else, I track hits of all my sites, and one thing they tell me is that I don't pay enough attention to XML-RPC, at least based on the amount of attention it gets for me. It's a big-flow site, almost as much as Scripting News, if you can believe that. It's the fifth hit on Google for XML, ahead of some pretty famous sites. It's by far the number one reason people go to the DaveNet site. I guess I pay too much attention to the critics who say that XML-RPC isn't good enough for them. I think those people may have other motives, something we used to call Not Invented Here, which means they'll dis it if they didn't invent it. Maybe it's time to dust off some of the good stuff in XML-RPC-land.  

Scoble hosts an Open Sushi lunch in SF today, 1PM.  

Adam Green says that 2006 is the year the web will explode. Interesting theory, hope it's not true, because when Google tries to host my content, how much you want to bet they'll also change what I say by adding links to things they like (for example ads) and removing unnecssary links (for example, the ones I put there). And maybe if I write a post that talks about Eric Schmidt's hometown (I think it's Atherton) that somehow magically that post won't appear. Or, perhaps my site won't be included at all, by some mysterious algorithm (like Google News) not deemed worthy of inclusion. Hey it's just one guy writing it, after all. This would be a very bad development, so bad it should be made illegal, quickly, before they actually do it. 

BTW, in case you were at the HBS conference yesterday and caught my panel, this is what I was trying to say about the lack of maturity and vision in Silicon Valley. First, an example outside the valley. In 2001, Microsoft made a play to be the identity system for the Internet. Not just "an" identity system, "the" system. Technically it was probably very good but no one even considered using it. Why? Because it involved a lot of trust, and Microsoft had blown it, totally. No one in their right mind would trust a company that tried to cut off the air supply of a developer, deliberately. Now Google is probably going to try to do some hosting of our content, much like they're trying to host the content of the print industry. I suspect their arguments will be roughly the same as their defense of that program -- basically "Who the hell are you to tell us what to do." 

BTW, this brings us around to the EFF, which now claims to be supporting the interests of bloggers. Well they miss this one very basic point. We're inevitably headed for a faceoff with Google, just like the one with the book publishing industry. I think it's pretty clear that the EFF will be defending Google, not us.  

Mike Arrington summarizes our panel at the Harvard Business School conference yesterday.  

New Orleans Times-Picayune: "Americans wanted the oil and gas that flow freely off our shores. They longed for the oysters and shrimp and flaky Gulf fish that live in abundance in our waters. They wanted to ship corn and soybeans and beets down the Mississippi and through our ports. They wanted coffee and steel to flow north through the mouth of the river and into the heartland." 

More Adam Green 

Having just discovered his blog, I have some catching up to do.

On the Google API: "It would serve Google right if their API became a standard, and others allowed it to actually be used by everyone to make money, not just Google."