Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Rogers's memoir of his brief reign as the King of Pings.  

After years of maintaining absolute control over user's data in Microsoft Office, the new version promises to give total control to the user, and creates a path for developers to siphon users from Microsoft to new or specialized products. One would think that this would spawn an explosion of new products designed to please Office users but that's not what's happening. A group of large technology companies is proposing a competing set of formats, and has formed an alliance to confuse the market, and at least double the work of any developer who might want to support their products (with almost no installed base) alongside Microsoft's (with a monopolistic dominant installed base). It's not surprising that the group is lead by the detritus of the last generation of tech companies. The thriving companies, Google, Yahoo and others have the good sense to sit this time and money-waster out.  

Don't miss the irony that they named their alliance after a failed initiative of the 80s and 90s that was supposed to trouble Microsoft but instead flushed the proponents down the Toilet Of History.  

The Two Way Web joins The Web 2.0 Workgroup. 

I'm over at the Web 2.0 Workgroup at Mike Arrington's, and if you can believe this, none of these guys have read Microserfs. Totally 1.0. Unfuckingreal. 

BART supports RSS. 

The directory box in the right margin has evolved to include not only TechCrunch, but also links to two excellent podcasting directories from Tod Maffin and Adam Curry, and the archive of DaveNet essays going back to 1994. The thing all these have in common is that they are available in OPML and therefore can be knitted into any structure I choose. Watch for more changes in that box over the coming weeks, it's very easy for me to edit. I'm already sending emails to people requesting that they make their data available in OPML so I can plug them into my world.  

Cristian Vidmar taught the Textpattern blogging tool how to emit a categorized OPML readout of his site. Very nice! 

Can you see where this is going? The step after this is to have the stories emitted in OPML, then you could browse a blog, as if it were a single document, in an OPML browser. Sure there aren't many OPML browsers in 2005, just like there weren't many RSS aggregators in 1999, or podcasting clients in 2004. Just takes one to get the ball rolling, if the idea is sexy enough. 

Last year on this day Adam Curry and I did a Trade Secrets podcast. I'm going to listen to this one to see if they are funny or sad, a year later (or something else). The WSJ said (erroneously) that Trade Secrets was the first podcast, but it's a creative fiction, because it gives equal credit to both of us, which is fair.  

portforward.com clues you in on port forwarding.