Wednesday, October 27, 1999

Salon: No Love Lost Between Dow Jones and Microsoft. "Last Wednesday, the Dow Jones Newswire ran a story asserting that Microsoft lawyers had been asking for language in recent contracts that would allow the contracts to remain in effect if the company were to be broken up as a result of the ongoing antitrust case."

Great meeting this afternoon with Dale Dougherty and Peter Wiggin of O'Reilly. Lots to think about! While I was busy schmoozing and demoing there were a few glitches in the aggregator, accounting for doubles and triples on the new site. Fixed a bug!

News.Com: Does a web zine network make business sense? "Having published its alternative e-zine on the Web for the past five years, [Feed] now wants to join forces with similar sites in a bid to boost traffic and generate stronger ad sales."

InfoWorld reviews Mac OS 9 and Marimba DocService.

SalonHerringWiredFool.Com: "An experiment in Internet content. Four great story flows, one smart website."

Background: "Red Herring and Motley Fool cover the web from a financial viewpoint; Wired and Salon with a business and cultural view. All four are interesting and eclectic, and all four support the new XML standard for content syndication. Put together, this is the thinking-person's web, circa 2000 -- an interesting market, one that new technology makes even more interesting."

This new site will surely be controversial. "Basically I want to start a discussion, and see where it goes. And I didn't want it to be a theoretical discussion, I wanted to have a site live, on the air, changing every hour, perhaps even covering itself, in a way, if the various pubs decide to address the question on their sites as well as ours."

An Open Source Milestone in Aggregation. "The My.UserLand story flow has now made its way to an O'Reilly server, running Linux, with hourly updates. The application is written in Perl and the data is stored in the MySql relational database."

Paul Everitt: "FTP is not a distributed object system. This makes using a rich object system via FTP into an underwhelming experience."