Tuesday, March 23, 2004

Wired: Why RSS Is Everywhere. 

David Galbraith: "Bloglines doesn't do what I want." 

NY Times: "NASA's Mars rover Opportunity is resting on what was once a salty, rippling body of water, project scientists announced today." 

Craig Burton: Yet Another Namespace. 

Shelley Powers comments on Six Apart's new FAQ.  

Four years ago: Pike Beta. 

JetBlue's version of DirecTV is commercial television, the usual junk, with commercials you can't skip. Also, it's not particularly cheap these days. I paid $250 to fly to Orlando round trip a week in advance, non-stop on American Airlines. Via Michael Gartenberg, via Jared Blank, via NY Times. 

Harvard is hosting the iLaw conference, May 13-15. John Palfrey, the executive director at Berkman says they want bloggers to be part of the conference. The conference costs almost $2000, so we're offering a few scholarships for people-who-blog with an interest in Internet law. If you'd like to participate, please send me an email and I'll forward it to the organizers.  

Political Wire: Kerry owns five homes.  

NewsWatcher is a "new free RSS reader for Windows that includes the unique Vision interface developed by Scopeware and Dr David Gelernter." 

Thursday's meeting will be in Pound 201 at 7PM. We're going to test the new WiFi in preparation for BloggerCon, and also be sure everyone has an idea of what the facility is like. If you're in the area this Thurs, please come, we'll have more room than usual. Bring a friend and a laptop. 

Six Apart publishes a long FAQ about TypeKey. Comments here. 

Lots of great info on yesterday's C-for-Windows thread. 

Membership systems 

I just wrote something in an email that bears repeating publicly. I did my first membership system in LBBS in 1982, twenty-two years ago. The most recent one I did was in Radio Community Server, in 2002. Before that I did one that's still in use in Manila, it's part of mainResponder, the underpinnings of several groupware systems built in Frontier.

If and when we get our hands on the Six Apart API, I plan to wire up the mainResponder membership system to that API. I would do this for the same reason I quickly implemented support for the Blogger API in 2001, even though we already had the richer ManilaRPC interface. The reason is so simple it's hard for some people to understand. When someone else moves, if you do it the same way you're well on your way to bootstrapping a standard, and having a standard is good.

The only reservation I have about Six Apart is past experience with Trackback -- they changed their mind a few times, and didn't evolve the protocol very cleanly, so it was extra hard to implement and the docs were confusingly out of synch with the practice. I'm encouraged that this time they're going slowly, presumably reviewing the protocol several times, and when it's finally released it will be something they're prepared to evolve from in a compatible (ie non-breaking) way.

BTW, at some point someone is going to say use LDAP. It also occurs to me that directory maven Craig Burton will likely have an opinion about this. And the PingID people. What do they think? Is Microsoft whispering sweet nothings into Six Apart's ear about Passport? And has the latest software czar at Sun made the call about using Liberty Alliance?

This ain't Kansas anymore Toto.