Thursday, February 19, 2004

Paul Boutin: "Perhaps Kerry should make a special trip to Harvard to court the Berkman Center's A-list of bloggers for their support." Yes!  

We're booting up the Thursday evening meeting at Berkman. We didn't get the new microphone so the webcast is certain to suck. However the IRC channel is probably great. 

What is Exploit Boston? 

Chronicle: "Google has become the symbol of competition to the academic library." 

Kerry campaign: "We have finished experimenting with the RSS aggregator that was on this page and decided that it did not meet our needs."  

Jason Kottke calls Jakob Nielsen an ugly name on his way to making an important point, that the general press doesn't review tech products in a serious way.  

News.Com: "Manufacturers plan to start selling notebooks with integrated VoIP this year and plan later to offer notebooks with built-in cell phone capabilities." 

Atom use XML-RPC 

It's fascinating to read the comments on Russell Beattie's post about the Atom API. His concern is that he won't be able to build a client that talks to a weblog server through his Java toolkit because it doesn't allow the HTTP methods the API calls for. Further, he notes that the spec, which was openly developed, has a restrictive copyright.

The best answer is obvious, imho, use XML-RPC because it already has been adapted to and debugged in all the environments where blogging APIs need to run. By cutting almost to the bottom of the stack you will have to redo everything that took years to do. I think it's going to take longer to redo because XML-RPC didn't need to get any Java toolkits to change, it treaded more softly than the Atom does.

There's a practical side to protocol and format design that's missing in the Atom API. The goal is to make it easy for developers to hop on the bandwagon and get them committed to developing for the platform. Putting unnecessary hurdles in the way unnecessarily limits adoption, and virtually guarantees either stagnation or massive breakage. I can't imagine that either choice is what Google is looking for.

XML-RPC was designed for what they want to do and it's stood the test of time. Learn to love the pragmatic, it's how you're going to win the wars with Yahoo, Microsoft and everyone else who wants to eat your lunch.