Phillip Miseldine: "Give your head a scratch, and tell me what benefit would come from spending the time, effort, and development complexity (well, a larger, more complex XSLT stylesheet) by having to support Atom? If I get a reasonable answer, I might just resubmit my article."

J.D. Lasica: Tracking blogdom's rise on Technorati.

How many people have started a blog today? J.D. covers the trends.

Tim Anderson asks "Are code snippets evil?"

This is a feature in the next version of Visual Studio that lets developers drag a whole code block out. This is one of my most favorite features of Whidbey (code name for Visual Studio 2005). As a beginner it lets me find something like "Print this," drag it to your code editing window, and voila! you have a bunch of code that adds printing features to your app.

For beginners like me this is invaluable because I can learn to code by studying these snippets.

Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText, is blogging Red Herring's conference.

InfoWorld's Chad Dickerson: Blogging behind the firewall.

InfoWorld’s internal Weblog started as an experiment. Already, it’s indispensable.

Heh, I wonder what they talk about on their internal blogs.

One of the frustrations working in a big company is if you aren't working at the headquarters you don't feel like you're really part of the company.

I felt that when I was an employee of NEC (about 115,000 employees). I didn't even know who the CEO was.

But blogging is changing this in a big way. But in an unexpected way too.

It also lets those of us at the headquarters see what's happening out in other offices. For instance, Jian Shuo Wang is a Microsoft employee in Shanghai, China. Today he writes about how he sees Microsoft's bloggers.

Blogs are letting us build relationships that are pretty deep. Now, if I ever have a question about the Chinese market, I know just who to ask. And, I bet that Jian Shuo knows a few more of us back at headquarters to ask when he has a question.

Susan Kitchens continues great blog coverage of the JPL (the guys who put the rover on Mars). Here she covers the JPL open house.

Andrew Boardman turned on a full content RSS feed. Subscribed!

Glenn Fleishman: "It's a well-established practice as a journalist that if you find out about a story from another publication, not a source or your own research, you credit that source. If you don't know that another publication broke the news, you're off the hook, too, generally. But don't go taking my scoop away."

Sam Ruby, of IBM, and the guy most identified with the Atom syndication format, talks about his reaction to the Atom group's courting by the W3C: "However, if a choice must be made, and a choice is an option, the IETF was from the beginning, and remains, my first choice."

Steve Outing, of the Poynter's Institute (the R&D arm of the newspaper industry): The Media bloggers respect.

I wonder, who is doing research on the role that full-text syndication is playing on this list?

By the way, Steve is pointing to JD Lasica's report of Dave Sifry's Technorati meeting.

What makes you respect certain news sources more and others less?

Nick Denton: "Why are business journalists so obsessed by blogs?"

His answer is that they are narcissistic. I think the real answer is more complex. First of all, journalists are news hounds. And weblogging now brings us an efficient way to watch what a large number of people are thinking about.

And, this is a trend in business that is important. Microsoft alone has seen the number of bloggers go up by six times over the past year. Does that count as an important business trend?

Are you considering starting or hosting a blog of your own? Owen of Asymptomatic produced: The Blog Software Breakdown, an awesome comparison of quite a few of the tools that are available.

This effort isn't comprehensive (Das Blog, and Radio UserLand, for instance, aren't on it) but it gives you a good starting point to compare all blog tools.

Congratulations to Mike Schinkel keeping his Xtras software distribution business going for 10 years.

There's a ton of people blogging from Microsoft's sold-out TechED conference this week. Plus lots of journalists too. Watch "WatchingMicrosoftLikeAHawk" for the professionals' reports and TechED Bloggers and weblogs.asp.net (that's where hundreds of Microsoft-centric bloggers hang out) for blog reports.

Anywhere else people should watch? Leave the URL in the comments here.

MicrosoftMonitor asks why Microsoft makes some documents available only within EXE files. From what I heard it's because that way we can sign those EXEs so you are sure they came from Microsoft and that the system wasn't hacked. In other words, it's a security measure.

But, I'm not sure. Anyone directly involved want to give Joe an answer? I wish they were available in an easier to install format too, though. I wonder if there's a way to make that happen.

One other problem with getting people into RSS feeds is that some sites don't even identify that they are offering a feed. For instance, the Random Bytes weblog offers a feed, but there isn't a link from the main page.

I think this is bad. Maybe in five years after everyone already knows how to use an autodiscovery mechanism to find the feed (I used NewsGator's autodiscovery mechanism to find the one here) this would be fine, but right now too many people don't understand feeds and need the XML icon, or at least a link to the syndication feed.

Of course there's a chance that I just missed the feed link. I really don't like sites that don't use the XML icon.

Just got back from taking Maryam to the Seattle Mariners game. What a wonderful day in Seattle, plus we won!

Cool, a blog just for Office suites.

Steve Rubel: A petition to commit to proper blog sourcing.

The unfortunate reality here, however, is that many bloggers themselves often neglect to properly credit other webloggers who break hard news through real reporting. How can we expect the press to source us if we neglect to credit the other members of our own community? Many journalists have a code ethics they must abide by. We don't.

Mark Pilgrim wrote a very interesting article this week about free software and got a ton of inbound links and hits and, uh, crazy-### motherf####s. He covers it all in his aftermath post.

David Coursey: once again, why Microsoft doesn't kill Apple. "Want to see what Microsoft will do tomorrow--at least in some areas--look at a Mac today."

David Brownell looks into Google's "Google is not evil" positioning strategy and says that that could be a winning strategy long term.

David, in his comments, points at Paul Allen (no, not that Paul) where Paul says "I think Google has the right approach and Microsoft has a very big rig to try to turn. I don't think they can turn it in time. So I'll be the first to blog the prediction that Google's market cap will exceed Microsoft's within 10-15 years. Go Google!"

Dave Shea, over at messoblue, has a guide to syndication for designers.

Dare Obasanjo, the guy who wrote RSS Bandit, chimes in on more of Microsoft's approach to syndication.

In a separate post Dare asks "should I do a Bill Gates ThinkWeek paper?" Absolutely, but do it with a twist. Publish it on your weblog first.

John Robb, over on the K-log mailing list, pulled out the relevant parts of what Bill Gates said. John says this is what you should forward to your CEO so they can understand the power of RSS and weblogs.

John McDowell says I mischaracterized his comments about RSS. Hmmm, I didn't do so maliciously. Sometimes I'm just a bit stupid and hard-headed. Forgive me.

Why do I take such a hard-line stance? Cause I've been using RSS now for a few years and I can't stand feeds that don't include full text. Feeds that do that infuriate me.

Do I lose perspective on this issue? Yes.

So, now, I'll try to get back perspective. John points out the SPOT watch. Oh, good point, I wouldn't want a full feed there. Well, actually, I do, but the bandwidth and system and display don't make a full feed viable. OK, in that situation, a feed producer should make two feeds available: one full text, and one for the SPOT watch. Just like many Web sites today have two separate sites: one for a browser, and one for a cell-phone/WAP browser.

Regarding notification changes, though. The Alerts team is working on an interesting workaround for that. Have a system that watches your RSS feed, then translates it into short notifications that can be sent to MSN Messenger, or elsewhere.

Sorry for being hard headed and/or mischaracterizing your words John. Glad to help set them straight.

What's the most awaited developer book of the year? I can't think of many that'd beat Steve McConnell's Code Complete 2.0. Can you?

Ahh, Ian Hanschen is having a ball at work (he recently took a job at Microsoft -- he's one of the developers of WindowsBlinds).

I know just what he means. I am gonna track Ian down for a Channel9 interview.

Ben McConnell over on Church of the Customer blog has a list of business rock star blogs he'd like to read.

See, Ben, here's what's happening: the rock stars of tomorrow are gonna be bloggers. Why? Cause the network is getting broader and deeper.

XML.com has an introduction to the new WSDL 2.0 standard (Web Services Definition Language).

Microsoft employees: Over on Channel9 forums the questions are coming hot and heavy. Come join in the fun. For instance, here's a question from security expert Dana Epp about how Longhorn will be setup for first user? He has some interesting ideas of how to make things more secure.

There's two forums of note there:

1) The Coffeehouse. General discussion about anything Microsoft related (heck, there've even been a few Linux questions asked and answered there too).

2) TechOff. This is for hard-core technical discussions.

Newsmap is a cool Flash-based headline reader. You click on a country and news headlines come up. I won't use it, you understand, but it's interesting to see people trying different ways to serve up the news.

Why won't I use it? Because I already get this news in a far more useful way and I find this hard to read. Thanks Chris Johnson for the link.

Ole Eichhorn has written a cool RSS guide for beginners who are wondering what all this syndication hype is about and how to get started.

Alex Kolesnichenko has a proposal for RSS 1.0 and Atom that is interesting -- he's trying to find a way to send schedule information down via syndication feeds.

Syndication experts? How is this approach? Is there a simpler way to do it?

Mark Cuban has an idea for how to speed up the transition to digital HDTV. Me? I'd rather have the cable industry forced to open themselves up to Tivo and to Microsoft's Windows Media Center. That's largely what's holding back HDTV. The cable boxes suck and getting them to work with PVRs is really a pain in the behind (not to mention that they aren't well integrated).

Jerry Colonna is blogging about what it's like to be CEO of a venture-backed startup company. Thanks to Ed Sim for the link.

Shaan Hurley, of Autodesk, talking about how to give good feedback to software companies: "Don't talk smack... instead give back."

Todd Kitta: Full text RSS.

I've just unsubscribed from News.com too. News.com used to put a synopsis in their feeds, now they put just a headline. That's really lame.

I guess JD is right. Making your RSS feed only have headlines does reduce bandwidth? How? Cause people unsubscribe.

I sure wish we had some way to do some research on this. Does a feed with full text bring more or less traffic to your Web page than publishing a feed with only headlines?

Greg Schechter: Introducing 3D in Avalon and 2D/3D integration.

Nice introduction, links to other introductions.