RSS 2.0 under new ownership. Dave Winer has transferred the copyright of the RSS 2.0 specification to Harvard's Berkman Center and formed an advisory board with Brent Simmons and Jon Udell to maintain the spec, promote the format, and chart its future development.

As someone who has been working on a new RSS 2.0 spec at SSF-DEV, I'm glad to see it moving to a community development model. There are a lot of implementors and users who are eager to participate, as evidenced by the 39 people who have joined SSF-DEV in the last month. [Workbench] 
11:57:27 PM      comment []   trackback []  



David Galbraith on Technorati's new feature: "Over the longer term, this is perhaps as ground breaking as what weblogs have done for web publishing and ultimately will leverage the weblog model to its full potential..." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
11:49:25 PM      comment []   trackback []  



The Art of Not Getting It. One of the things that I like about the Dean campaign is the way that they get the Net. They... [Backup Brain] 
12:08:00 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Information Wants to be Almost Free.... From Chuck Taggart I learn about "eMusic, an online MP3 subscription service that, in some ways, beats the living crap out of Apple's iTunes Music Store. Not that I don't love iTunes -- in fact, I spent about $45 in there over the last few weeks, and there'll probably always be stuff I want in there. But the kinds of music I'm really interested in -- lots of roots, folk, trad, blues and indie rock/pop -- are much more prevalent at eMusic than in iTunes." I'm on it... [Follow Me Here...] 
12:06:08 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Dear Mr. President:. The White House has a new system for email from the public. Dashing off a rant, a rave or a question to president@whitehouse.gov won't cut it anymore. Now it takes a maze of forms and clicks and filters. The first question: is this a supportive message or a differing opinion? Then you have to pick your topic from various menu lists. And list a name and address and email. And reply to an automated message making sure it's really your email. White House tech guy tells the NYTimes: "When it comes to a Web site, it's a bit like a movie. Some will say it's a tour de force; some will say it fell flat." Fun Fact: all emails are saved and must be publicly disclosed in 12 years. [MetaFilter] 
10:57:52 AM      comment []   trackback []  



CNN on RSS and news aggregators. Christine Boese writes an overview of news aggregators as a new way to read weblogs and news sites.

"Less wasted time and more efficient surfing might appeal to folks dealing with harassing pop-up windows and masses of spam. It helps to balance the signal-to-noise ratio back in our favor." [ranchero.com] 
10:57:10 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Homeland Security Irony. I'm not the only person to notice the obvious irony of these two news articles: Microsoft chosen as exclusive Homeland Security contractor Microsoft admits critical flaw in nearly all Windows software It's astonishing how few people remember that just a... [CamWorld: Thinking Outside the Box] 
1:48:20 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Echo vs. RSS. Ron Burt on Echo: Bandwidth and Echo: Trust, Information and Gossip in Social Networks ("pdf", 144 KB). »Pretty much explains what's driving the RSS-vs-Echo wars, imo. No wonder they want to rename their format« "smile" [Der Schockwellenreiter] 
1:34:20 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Google viewless.

Deploying Google Viewer. Greg reports that some of his search results contain a "View results as slide show" link, presumably using Google viewer. Have you seen this?... [Google Weblog]

The interface has an interesting CD player like styling to it.  But in IE6 I got a script error that prevented it from doing anything more than look interesting.  Bummer. [Curiouser and curiouser!] 
1:24:26 AM      comment []   trackback []