Thursday, May 20, 2004

Bill Gates pushes RSS to CEOs of the world's top companies.  

Transcript of the Gates speech. Reuters article. 

Guardian: "There are around 400 Microsoft employees blogging." 

Talking Moose: "Lots of people seem to think I'm Scoble." 

Jim Roepcke: "I am giddy with excitement..." 

Evan Williams: "We're certainly excited about RSS." 

Wes Felter: "What a great way to attack RSS and co-opt its publicity..." 

Tim Jarrett: "Sounds like a positioning statement to me." 

Feedster query for coverage of yesterday's developer meeting at Technorati. There doesn't seem to be one weblog that's gathering all the coverage. Don Park has a picture of JY Stervinou from France who was in SF at the meeting, with Loic, who is Joi's guy in Europe. A lot of geography in that sentence. Christian Crumlish took notes. Wish I could have been there. I'm in NYC meeting with people in the publishing industry tomorrow. Busy busy. Bing bing? 

Leadership Council on Civil Rights supports RSS. 

Don Park visited with a couple of old buds from the early Mac days -- Mike Boich and Robert Simon. We used to be younger. Hey they look good. Forgive them for becoming venture capitalists.  

Four years ago today, a pic of an Amsterdam canal in spring regalia. 

Two years ago today, the origin of the isPermaLink attribute of guid in RSS. The request came from Rich Salz. 

Wired: "Rumors that Google is offering users of its Gmail service an unprecedented 1 terabyte of storage space are untrue, the company said Wednesday, blaming a bug in the system for the confusion." 

Taegan Goddard reports on a "blog scandal" in DC. 

Paolo Valdemarin and the Evectors team have a substantial investment in code that runs in the Frontier environment. I called Paolo from a train in Germany earlier this month and we talked about the release. I can't speak for Paolo of course, but my wish is for humble expectations, a very long-term perspective, a no-rush attitude. We've learned from previous incarnations of the Frontier community, when expectations are too great, when we're too much of a rush, then feelings rule, not intelligence. Paolo and his partners have bet their future on this in the past, with very mixed results. I want to do much better this time around the loop. 

One idea I've been toying with is, on release, to make a declaration -- I will not do another release for at least one year. This probably will cause forks to happen right way, thereby removing the power of threats to fork. Go ahead and fork, the sooner the better. Perhaps we'll even manage an OPML directory of each of the forks, and see what their selling propositions will be. Maybe one will do a great job of supporting the Mac platform. Maybe one will integrate with Mozilla. Maybe the OSF will adopt one, maybe Apache, maybe Microsoft or Sun or Google, MIT or Harvard. I've thought of trying to force interop through the license, but I'm not sure if that would work. I'd like to have my apps run in any Frontier-derived environment. The system.environment table can help code configure itself. I guess what I'm saying is that it's important that we work together, but it's also important to recognize that if the power to fork is there, then forks will certainly happen. This is similar to my philosophy of format design. I assume we'll come up with the worst-possible names for elements, and then factor that into my plans. 

John Fraser: "What doors will Frontier open?" 

BBC: Wi-fi may tempt train travellers. 

An unfair article about Linus Torvalds and his role in developing Linux. You can do a very quick barn raising in software, even of a substantial piece like a Unix clone. But Linux wasn't written by one person in a few months, it's been in development for a decade, by a group of developers.  

UserLand: Manila 9.0.1. 

Interesting email this morning from "TheoDP," cc'd to Dan Gillmor, Larry Lessig and others, about Amazon's patents. First bit shows that Amazon assigned several of its patents to Deutsche Bank between 1995 and 1997, all before they were issued, as part of a $75 million credit agreement in December 1997. Bezos wrote, in 2000: "Despite the call from many thoughtful folks for us to give up our patents unilaterally, I don't believe it would be right for us to do so." He omitted a crucial piece of data -- they weren't his to give up.