Will MS force RSS standards?

It's an interesting question. At this point you have Atom going against several flavors of RSS. Right now there are no real killer apps that take advantage of syndication. Sure, blogs use it. But other than Yahoo, there isn't much point in the mainstream getting too excited about the controversy. Some standardization need to happen.

Rick Bruner, president, Executive Summary Consulting, agrees. "It comes down to what Microsoft does with it. Longhorn is expected to come with an RSS reader. At that point, it could go mainstream--it could become a viable ad medium then," Bruner says. --Mediapost

Gmail attacked from all sides

It wasn't like you couldn't see this coming. Google's proposed email service, called Gmail, is under attack long before it even has become a reality.

Here are the expected complaints, most if not all of which involve privacy:

"Gmail will offer users a gigabyte of online storage, enough that they will never need to delete another message, according to the service's Web site. Indeed, the Gmail privacy policy warns that messages, even if 'deleted,' may still be stored in the system long after users have closed their account--something that bothers the privacy campaigners." --PCWorld

I guess so. That idea would bother me too. It's bad enough trying to be careful of what you say in email, but having your email conversations indexed and stored where they can't be deleted isn't too great an idea.

Here is the unexpected complaint: the word "Gmail" is already trademarked by another company. OOPS, what was Google thinking?

"Following Google's use of the name Gmail in a press release, financial service provider The Market Age PLC (TMA) registered its interest in the name with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the British company says in a news release. TMA launched a Web-based e-mail service called Gmail in mid-2002 as part of an online share price and currency exchange rate analysis service offered by subsidiary Pronet Analytics.com, it says. Pronet's Gmail allows subscribers to annotate stock price charts and forward them by e-mail. The company is seeking advice on how to protect its intellectual property, it says." --PCWorld

The nitty-gritty of Atom and RSS

If you want to get into the real differences between Atom and RSS, just go to Mark Pilgrim's new article for XML.COM.

This is the best article I've seen to explain what the controversy is all about. Not from a political view, but a programmer's view. An example:

The other problem is that there is no way to know whether an entry's description is being used as a summary or as full content. Atom solves this problem by simply defining separate summary and content elements, and Atom feeds generally contain one or the other (although mine includes both, which is also valid).

Blogger in a Box?

With Google coming out with Gmail, things may be falling into place with the thinking behind Google's purchase of Blogger.

Take a look at this for some insight on where Google is going with knowing and tracking the Internet habits of everyone. Then go on to Phil Wolff's Blog where he fills in the details. I won't bother repeating anything because it is good enough for you to go there and read the full post. Trust me on this.

The final thought on this: "By the way if Microsoft should 'beware' of a company it should be Google..."

Unavailable for comment

Love this little jab from Best of the Web Today talking about a speech by Ted Kennedy:

Kennedy said, "This president has now created the largest credibility gap since Richard Nixon." And: "He has broken the basic bond of trust with the American people."

Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.

Interview with Movable Type founders

One of the original and still one of the best of the blog platforms is Movable Type. There's an excellent interview with Mena and Ben Trott, founders of Six-Apart, in the San Mateo Daily Journal.

The value of blogs, and the basis by which the Trotts have built their business around the development of a blog-creation system called Movable Type, is in the shared community one enters when becoming a blogger.

Take a look. It's really interesting to see how a twenty-something married couple turned an idea into a blog platform. Of course, if you know anything about them, you also know that:

After tweaking their business model, they decided they wanted to focus on consumers. Six Apart unveiled the first version of TypePad, a pay-for-blogging tool built upon the Movable Type system, in April of 2003. Around the same time they closed their first round of venture capital funding.

Blogging gene discovered

What drives a person to blog? Turns out that some people are pre-disposed to blog --Born To Blog could be their motto.

This discovery was revealed today by the Register, the British equivalent to Scientific American. If the Register states that something is scientific fact, then it must be so in the same sense that an Alabama county school board concluded that evolution is a "theory" held in disrepute by most scientists. But I digress.

Webloggers are born not made, and shouldn't be persecuted. The activity could be a positive, group-bonding social function such as grooming, or simply a harmless way of passing the time, such as masturbation.

In sifting through the blog data, scientists were first puzzled by one method bloggers use for social interaction. Something the scientists first believed was called "arse feeding" but later discovered was more likely called "RSS feeds". The exact purpose of Arse or "RSS" feeds remains a mystery.

Wonkette shows how to break into political blogging

Breaking into the tight circle of well-read political blogs has go to be the equivalent of stuffing a pimento back into an olive: 1) It's hard to do, and 2) why would you want to anyway? There's a lesson here to be learned. If you want to start a blog that gets read, be prepared to find a niche nobody else has exploited, or do whatever the others are doing, but more so. Take the Wonkette, for example:

The arrival of wonkette.com - and its rising notoriety here - signals that even a serious town like Washington (where rumor serves a purpose but gossip is somehow disdained) can capitulate to Hollywood-style tittle tattle. To those who fear the erosion of serious journalism, the wonkette's arrival on the steps of the Capitol is a quiet victory for creeping National Enquirer values. It is also another example of the boundary-busting powers of the Internet, where writers like to be less deferential to authority, more saucy, and frankly less accurate than established print or television. --News Obvserver

The Wonkette is Ana Marie Cox, a 31 year-old redhead from Nebraska. So, how does she take the same old hash and make it taste different? "She's fun and fresh and right on the money - and is writing what others think but can't always write. ... She can curse, for example."

Searching "porn" with Google local

We pointed out before that Google now has a local option. We also pointed out it was in Beta, but it's beginning to look like there are a few kinks.

Ernie the Attorney told me that when he searches "porn" with Google Local in his part of the world (New Orleans), it comes up with lawyers. He invited me to try for myself.

I tried it in my neck of the woods and sure enough, a search on "porn" got a list of all the lawyers in my zip code. Even more interesting was what happens when you search on "porno." The number one search return on Google Local for "porno" was this:

Catholic Diocese of Baton Rouge

Is this some weird form of Google Bashing? That would be a bit hard to do. It really seems more like some extreme tweaking needs to be done to the Google search algorithms currently being used in the Google Local Beta version. Or maybe Google is making some political statement? Naw, Google isn't into politics as far as I know. Maybe the Googlers just have some deep-seated grudge against lawyers and the church.

Try a few searches in your own area. Try "porn" and then "porno" with your own zip code. What do you get? Lawyers or the Catholic Church? Leave a comment on what turns up where you live.

Google goes email

What tha hey? Google is starting an email service? Looks like they made a list of everything that is wrong, wrong, wrong with MS and Yahoo and went where they needed to go. From the Gmail site:

Gmail is an experiment in a new kind of webmail, built on the idea that you should never have to delete mail and you should always be able to find the message you want. The key features are:

Search, don't sort. Use Google search to find the exact message you want, no matter when it was sent or received.

Don't throw anything away. 1000 megabytes of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message.

Keep it all in context. Each message is grouped with all its replies and displayed as a conversation.

No pop-up ads. No banners. You see only relevant text ads and links to related web pages of interest.