Wednesday, March 24, 2004

US News and World Report supports RSS. Bing! 

Rogers Cadenhead reviews the Guardian's latest article about RSS.  

Barlow: "I did a little amateur actuarial analysis in Excel and found that the fatality rate among my 100 closest friends was right up there with rock stars and private pilots." 

Scott Johnson reports that Feedster now supports enclosures.  

I don't know what Yandex is, but it's Russian and it supports RSS.  

BloggerCon: Shirky's Power Law. 

I wrote this session description as an example for the discussion leaders, who will generally write their own descriptions, and refine them based on comments. Each description, as they become available, will be in a weblog post where people can comment. The sessions can begin long before the actual conference. I will send invitations to experts asking them to participate, even if they will not be physically present on the 17th.  

Marcus Lillkvist, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, is researching a story and would like to talk with non-technical people who use RSS, to keep current on subjects like gardening, travel, health; i.e. non-geek subjects. Please send an email if you fit the bill, and I'll forward it to Marcus.  

Doc Searls: "They crush statues with every sentence they write." 

Kaye Trammel: "If you are going to be in or around Gainesville on April 1, then consider coming to this free symposium." Believe it or not, I will be. What an amazing coincidence. Kind of like being in Charlottetown at the same time they were having a weblog conference on the other side of the island. 

Reuters: AOL sees future in Web standards. 

Fred Kaplan: "I have no doubt that Richard Clarke, the former National Security Council official who has launched a broadside against President Bush's counterterrorism policies, is telling the truth about every single charge." 

Chapter 5 of Dan Gillmor's book is up for review. 

Baby squirrels: "The Cluetrain says we should be more open and communicate. I've bought into that. So have the Trotts and their investors. If they have to walk on eggshells in order to communicate, they're going to do less of it. So try to give them the benefit of the doubt, and try to work with them." 

People seem to like the Baby Squirrels piece. I thought I'd get flamed mercilessly for this one. Weird. 

BBC: "Microsoft must pay a fine of $613 million for abusing its dominant market position, the EU has ordered." 

Sean Gallagher suggests that the blogging world adopt Liberty Alliance, and that Google might use Orkut as their identity system. These ideas are not new to Scripting News readers. Sean says it would be a miracle if the blogging world adopts a pre-built protocol like Passport or Liberty Alliance, but those might be overkill for the comment spam issue. Aside from that, while I don't speak for UserLand (I need to remind people of this constantly, it's been almost two years since I worked there) I offered to implement Six Apart's scheme yesterday. My intererest is fewer ways to do the same thing, not more. It's the other guys who keep reinventing stuff that works. My sin is (often) creating the first implementations, when I've gone second I've generally followed the guy who went first.  

Wired's story about the Rave award winners for 2004. 

NY Times: "Phishing attacks, in which criminals send fraudulent e-mail to steal private information from people, are growing rapidly." 

Blogger dinner in Chicago tonight.