Microsoft To Extend RSS: "Joshua53077 writes 'Microsoft announced today a plan to 'extend the RSS standard to better support the publishing of ordered lists of information...' This feature will be included in Longhorn. It appears as though they will be including RSS support in Internet Explorer, which will come over a year and a half after the same technology was introduced in Apple's Safari RSS.'....(Via Slashdot.)

Paging RSS, Paging RSS, several of the senators from Microsoft would like to meet you in Pompey's theater to present you with a petition.

Please come...alone.

postscript: I love how MS uses the word "extend" with a straight face. Why don't they just be honest and say the word "kill"?

10:22:47 PM     Discuss: []

Legal Music Downloads At 35%, Soon To Pass Piracy: "bonch writes 'Entertainment Media Research released a study stating that 35% of music listeners are using legal download services, and that the percentage will soon surpass illegal downloads, currently at 40%"(Via Slashdot.)

Pirates vow to match legal sites, begin lowering their pric....oh...crap! What's lower than "free"?!?

3:14:43 PM     Discuss: []

So, Odeo is finally up and running. I subscribed to be notified when it went live a while back, and I got an e-mail last night.

I had in fact, forgotten what Odeo was, so was glad to find out I hadn't signed up to be sent mail-order Russian male gigolos or something.

So, What is Odeo? Well, simply put it's a Podcast subscription service. It also appears to allow you to submit your own podcasts, but I A) don't have a Podcast and B) haven't gotten that far into it.

Nice things:
It's Windows/Mac and it downloads neatly to iTunes.
Because it's based on their server, your subscriptions stay synchronized.
A pretty impressive selection of podcasts. They had all my stuff, plus a couple of new ones that I'd "meant" to connect to.
Support for sync with other RSS Aggregators. So that means I could actually have NetNewWire do the actual grunt work, instead of their little synch program.

Annoying Things:
I think I want NetNewsWire because their little synch program seems kinda slow, even on my cable.
Podcasts come down with really disparate "Genre" tags, so it's hard to put them in a "podcast" playlist.
The above is really the "fault" of the 'casters themselves, but I've gotten used to NetNewsWire changing the Genre to "Podcast" when I asked it to.

Pretty cool so far tho.
3:12:18 PM     Discuss: []