Wednesday, March 08, 2006

I'm at Skobee headquarters at 604 Mission, in downtown San Francisco where I'm leading a discussion among engineering-oriented entrepreurs called 106 Miles. 

Squash: Poor Web 2.0 fools. "This VC is a complete and utter twit." 

A few simple ideas I call A Busy Developer's Guide to RSS 2.0. Comments and suggestions are welcome. 

Nick Bradbury's BDG for RSS. 

Apple is patenting our inventions, again. Oy. 

Jens Alfke, one of Apple's "inventors" stopped by to explain how there's no real generosity in the tech business. I can see where he might get that idea, working where he does.  

Mike Arrington has screen shots of Google's new calendar.  

Besty Devine: "I drove up to NH today to go digging around the Court Clerk's offices in Federal District Court, to see what lawyers for convicted phone-jamming conspirator James Tobin are up to in exchange for the $2.3 million they've been paid (so far) by the Republican National Committee." 

3 babes 

I've been looking for the perfect day to run this picture of the 3 hot babes of the California web, and I guess today is the perfect day.

White fences 

Over the years I've learned that you can't lead by asking people to do things. It doesn't work that way. If I want you all to paint your fences white, I can't say "Wouldn't it be great if your fences were white?" I could go on and on explaining how nice white fences look, how they last longer, and how if all the fences were the same color your property values would go up. No one wants to go first. So you have to do it yourself, even if you don't have a fence, even if you don't have a house.

Not too long ago I suggested that if you wanted to make RSS 2.0 better one could instead create what's called a profile of RSS. I was introduced to the term by Andrew Layman, in 2001, who was then one of Microsoft's chief XML architects. At the time we were trying to get a complicated protocol to interop, and I suggested that perhaps it would be easier if we looked at a small subset, instead of trying to get interop across what had become a far-reaching protocol. So we came out with what we called a Busy Developer's Guide, or BDG, and it proved to be quite popular.

So if I want a BDG for RSS 2.0 -- it's the white fences again. I bet if I write my own profile of RSS 2.0, others will get inspired do their own. Who does he think he is doing a profile of RSS. We'll show him! Ours will be better. And I'll be chuckling to myself thinking that it worked, I got what I wanted.