Friday, March 17, 2006

Phil Jones: "The entire history of computer science can be interpretted as one long war between pragmatic tool builders and idealistic format / process builders." 

Mike Arrington notes that the NY Times is linking to the discussion on Scripting News from Esther's op-ed piece. That's pretty coooool! 

People who doubt that thoughtful discourse is possible in the blogosphere, need only look at the discussion here about Goodmail. In just a few hours we've heard why Goodmail is not the solution to the spam problem. That is, unless someone who believes in Goodmail can explain why it's anything more but a new way for Goodmail, Inc and their partners (AOL and Yahoo) to make money. 

ComputerWorld: New Orleans' Wi-Fi network now a lifeline. 

Mary Hodder: 400 skydivers in tandem. 

I've been emailing with David Berlind who is in the hospital recovering from back surgery yesterday, apparently it was successful and he's getting better. Best wishes to David and his family.  

I missed this bit about a speech given by retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor, warning of "dictatorship" in the United States. It was mentioned at the end of the first hour of the Diane Rehm show this morning.  

Dan MacTough: "The buzz-o-meter on OPML browsers is off the charts right now." 

New header graphic. A railroad crossing in northwest Wisconsin, photographed on 8/29/04. 

Dave Johnson experiments with the Microsoft Feeds API, and finds they've made some unusual choices, which may not be good for interop. The solution of course is to parse the XML yourself, and it's definitely not too late for the community to provide the equivalent of the Microsoft toolkit, if perhaps the community can discuss such a thing without flaming out.  

Looking for Mr Goodmail 

Esther Dyson has an op-ed in today's NY Times about Goodmail. We discussed this in a roundtable at her conference earlier this week. Not quite an unconference, but some ideas were exchanged, in a relatively relaxed way. At one point I got the mike and asked if anyone could give an argument against Goodmail -- no one did. I'm not saying there aren't any, but what are they? BTW, I think Esther's piece is right-on.

Daniel Dreymann, co-founder of Goodmail, checks in. "Most leading vendors have already signed up with Goodmail to make it a standard feature on their MTAs."

I asked if they have filed for or received patents. Dreymann said: "We do have intellectual property here but we provide software libraries for implementing the sending side and libraries for the receiving side -- all free of charge to interested MTA implementers." Sounds like they do have patents. Okay, that's a reason it might not work.

MTA is an acronym for Mail Transfer Agent.