Dave Winer has started a new site for people to learn about syndication (er, RSS): Really Simple Syndication.

InformIT's Nigel McFarlane, in an opinion piece titled "Smoke, Mirrors, and Silence: the Browser Wars Reignite": "Make no mistake: Microsoft really hates the web. The new browser war may appear to be about the emergence of Mozilla and friends with their polished eye-candy interfaces, but it's really about Microsoft versus the W3C. Internet Explorer is Microsoft's blocking tactic—never to be properly web-compliant, never to give the W3C a day in the sun—and Longhorn technology is the big-stick alternative being built. One of the purposes of Longhorn is to destroy the web as we know it."

Sigh. Even if all that were true (it's not) I'm running Mozilla's Firefox on Longhorn just fine. But, he's right that IE isn't the most up-to-date-with-the-latest-standards browser out there right now. Which is why I'm using Firefox. The IE team, by the way, is interacting with anyone who drops by on Channel9's forums.

Here's another thread on when will IE support standards.

A third thread is titled "does Microsoft care about Webmasters?"

Finally, there's a Wiki where people are keeping track of feature requests for the next version of Internet Explorer. (This is really cool, by the way, I wish every product's community took the time to do this).

Oh, and everytime I meet an IE team member in the halls (which is quite often) I grab them by the shirt, give them a nugie, and ask them when they are gonna support standards. Someday that's gotta affect them. ;-)

Personally, though, Nigel, you totally missed the boat. Syndication is where the action is. That's what's going to take lowest-common-denominator-platforms (er, the Web) ahead in huge leaps (no matter what platform you like). You should see the traffic graphs for RSS. Doubling every month.

Hope you're having a nice Memorial Day. We went to see Shrek 2 (nice movie) and now are on the way to see my dad and brother.

One link: Tejas Patel talks about the characteristics of influentials and links to a Fast Company article on such. Interesting analysis.

Who sent me that link? One of my invisible influentials: Christopher Coulter.