Thursday, November 16, 2006

Sylvia Paull: Mr GNU meets Mr RSS. 

According to Mike Arrington, Jason Calacanis has left AOL. Hey Jason, I call dibs on doing a project with you now that you're out of BigCoLand.  

Slate: "The new formats are doomed because shiny little discs will soon be history." 

Sitemaps becomes a defacto standard 

I've been pretty busy the last couple of days, so I've had to wait to offer my support and congratulations to Microsoft, Yahoo and Google for getting together on a protocol that optimizes search engine crawlers called Sitemaps. It's a simple format that should be easy for all the major tools to support. It helps improve the efficiency and currency of the web, good things of course, but it's even better that big companies are working together instead of reinventing. This means that developers only have to support one mechanism.

Of course it's pragmatic for Microsoft and Yahoo to get on board behind the leader in search, Google. But there have been many times when big companies have avoided such pragmatism, so they deserve our support and gratitude.

Now that the Dems control Congress 

I think having a Democratic Congress is cool, but it just pops off one level of lunacy. They're still talking about Iraq like it's a borough of NYC, both parties. I think I see what's going to happen now -- gradually Iran is taking over, waiting until they can announce that they have nukes. Eventually we'll have to decide whether we want to fight a war with Iran or come home, defeated. The purpose of the Baker group is to spin it so that it's not W's fault, maybe even pin it on the Dems. We're headed for some bad times, no way out of it, and I think they all know it, and they're jockeying not to let the blame land on them.

So what's the best outcome in Iraq? The Shi'ite part of Iraq will either become part of Iran or will be a client of Iran. The Sunni part will be annexed by Syria, and everyone will fight over Kurdistan. Now if I were a pessimist, I'd say that this is the place we'll fight World War III, with lots of fronts opening up all over the world, including here in the US.

It was never an option for Iraq to become an American style democracy, I don't think Bush and the neocons ever really believed that could happen. If they did, I would have loved to have seen the plan for that to come about. One thing you can hear in all the Washington spin is that no one is talking about democracy anymore. The next myth to explode is that Iraq actually has government. And we should stop shipping arms into Iraq, we're just arming various sides of the civil war, and bringing about the death of more Iraqis.

When you watch Baker in motion, don't think he's working for you. He's working for the Bush family, and more broadly, the Republican Party and the defense industry.