Saturday, June 25, 2005

I just spoke with Amar Gandhi and Sean Lyndersay of Microsoft at Gnomedex. They'll revise their spec in response to concerns reported by Phil Ringnalda. This turns yesterday's home run into a grand slam.  

A huge cargo ship in Puget Sound. 

Movie of the room at Gnomedex during the Microsoft announcement. 

Googlefight: RSS vs Jesus.  

Dan Farber: Gnomedexers gather around RSS. 

I'm sitting next to Frank Barnako, a very fast two-finger typer, taking notes on all that's said. I asked if he has anything to say to Scripting News people. "Hi mom." Heh.  

Steve, it's darkest just before dawn. 

Jason Calacanis: "If I was CEO of Technorati or Feedster there is no way I would ever dump my entire business into an uncontrolled cloud." 

BTW, Weblogs.com has always had an open back-end, we share all the data we generate, since its inception since 1999. On Friday we got 1.1 million pings. Technorati got all its data from us for their first few years (not sure how much they get now). As far as I know Technorati's back-end is also open, that was one of the conditions of our continuing to keep our back-end open. If it's true that they've gone closed we have an issue with them.  

BTW, we heard that invites for Foo Camp went out this week. Again, we did not get an invite (never have). There can't be open standards work done at this event, since it is a closed conference. I don't think the O'Reilly people understand how discourse works in this industry because they keep trying to do standards work limited to people they consider friends. Disconnect. Can't possibly work. I believe that's why Feedmesh has had such a troubled life, because it was born at a proprietary event. Look at how much work comes out of Gnomedex this year, and you'll see how powerful non-exclusivity is.  

Microsoft: Simple List Extensions Specification. 

Quick postscript on the Microsoft extensions to RSS 2.0. 

The schmoozing at this conference has been excellent. World class. Lots of the right people in the room. And all the connects were just happening. I was going to introduce Brent and Sheila Simmons to Dean Hachamovich, but when I went looking for Brent, he and Sheila were talking with Dean. Then I wanted to make sure Dave Luebbert and Doug Kaye had met, but when I went looking for Dave, he was over by the bar talking to Doug. It was just going like that. Meanwhile for me, a constant stream of interesting people doing interesting things and ready to do more. On the walk back to the hotel from the party with Steve Gillmor, Nick Bradbury told a similar story. I have seen this happen before, at the beginning of booming markets. Like the Apple II. We had this kind of collegiality when the Macintosh market was just about to boom, in 1986. You could feel it in the offices of Wired on Third St in SF in 1995. You can't bottle the feeling, and it doesn't last very long, maybe a year or two. But in these periods, when people are relaxed and excited and confident, you can really get stuff done. We'll remember Gnomedex 2005 for that for many years to come. 

Steve, I totally don't agree that developers have to support the Longhorn aggregator platform. Longhorn has a long way to go before it matters. And Microsoft has to do a lot more before developers should trust them enough to get in a locked trunk where Microsoft controls the air supply. In fact, I don't think there's anything they can do to earn that kind of trust. Keep the trunk open, let God the put the air in there, never trust a company to keep you alive.  

4/4/01: "There is a difference between riding in the car and being stuffed in the trunk."  

Geek News has MP3s of my keynote and the Microsoft announcement. 

Phil Ringnalda reviews Microsoft's embrace of RSS. 

Business Week: Microsoft Crashes the RSS Party. 

This is a joke ;-> 

It's official now, RSS is bigger than Jesus.