Rebooting the RSS cloud 

In the early days of RSS, we had the idea that instantaneous updates would be the next step. That was 2001. It took a little longer than we thought, but now with "realtime" as the Next Big Thing, it's time to reboot all that lovely stuff.

http://rsscloud.org/

If it works, it'll be a bootstrap. That means at first the results will be a few sites pinging each other and updating in realtime. If it gains traction, it'll get support from a lot of tech and media companies. It could happen very quickly.

One thing's for sure -- we'll need implementations in every language and runtime. I'm doing mine in the OPML Editor, of course. But just think of that as a reference implementation. I think the really scalable versions will be in Python, PHP or C.

Also thinking about using Amazon's SimpleDB to store the graph. We'll see..

Mulberry ice cream 

The editorial team of InBerkeley.com had lunch today at Saul's in North Berkeley. I had a bowl of cold borscht with sour cream, and a toasted bagel with lox and cream cheese.

After lunch we all went down the block to Chez Panisse and had a Bastille Day special mulberry ice cream cone for $2.