Monday, May 10, 2004

Jon Udell article about Mail To The Future, August 1999. I'm working on transitioning this app to the Scripting News servers. It's not part of UserLand's future, so I'm going to run it here. Getting pretty close to flipping the switch. Working on the XML-RPC interface now. 

Reuters: "The independent Army Times newspaper, read widely in the US military, on Monday suggested Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon civilian and military leaders should be removed over the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal." 

Boston Globe report on bloggers at the Democratic Convention. 

A simple thing you can do to irritate Reps and reassure Dems.  

Blogenstein "uses OPML files to keep track of weblog popularity." 

John Robb weighs in on Google's missing support for RSS. I'd add what I said to David Krane, it's a strategic issue, not an engineering issue, which is the party line from Google.  

Finally a clue to what Google means when they say that omitting RSS support is an engineering issue. They told San Jose Mercury News editor Dan Gillmor that they couldn't afford the server resources to maintain two feeds for each user. Dan wonders if this is true, and so do I. 

BBC: "One of the leading names in blogging is overhauling its service in an attempt to catch up with the competition." 

Contact with Google 

I have been emailing with David Krane, a PR person at Google, who works alongside Cindy McCaffery. That's good. He had emailed me an invite to use Gmail in the first wave of invites, but my very crude spam system coughed it up, and then hurled his follow-up email. Once I knew it was there and got back from Europe I tried to use it, only to find out that the invite had expired. Over the weekend David very kindly set me up with a new one, and now I have an empty Gmail account, dave.winer. Obviously it's not going to be much use until it starts getting some email, so send me a message if you feel so inclined.

As noted yesterday, it was disappointing that the new Blogger interface, which looks quite nice, doesn't support RSS 2.0. I'm far from the only one who's commenting. It would be so easy to do, so not evil, so grown-up, so much appreciated if they would just do it. Pretty soon RSS is going to be known as the format of the BigPubs, which is totally ironic because I'm one of the original bloggers. Come on guys, what if I say please? Please, I'm down on bended knees.

Another note, I now have four different logins at Google: Orkut, AdSense, Blogger and Gmail. Each with a different username and password. Now here's an area where Google could be a leader, provide an alternative to Passport, something we really need, a Google-size problem.

Both user interfaces, Gmail and the new Blogger are very slick, but Gmail is the more sophisticated. Those guys should get busy with blogging, if they're not already working on a blogging interface. And don't be surprised when Google announces a centralized aggregator a la Bloglines (hopefully not with a three-pane interface). That will be Microsoft's cue to release announce theirs, and we're off to the races. (I bet Sun buys Bloglines.) That's why it's so incredibly important that the format coalesce now before it becomes a basis for competition, like the browser wars of the 1990s. That's why I'm beggin. (Of course, with the great running start RSS has, this could be the final act for the Tech industry. Imagine if the users told them to get with the program or die. That would be very very cool.)