Friday, June 25, 2004

The US Department of Education has an RSS feed. 

Government Technology magazine also has one. 

AP: "Users can search their computers for the files Kk32.dll or Surf.dat to see if they are infected. Removal tools are available from major anti-virus vendors." 

An announcement. After giving it much thought, I've decided to resign from the RSS Advisory Board, effective July 1. I feel that the process for clarifying the spec is now well-understood by the existing members, and we have started a positive working relationship with several leading aggregator developers. Frankly, most of the time I was spending on the board has been in avoiding and dealing with flamers, which as others have noted is not a good use of my time. Now that I'm leaving Harvard, I want to spend much of my technical work time on the open source release of the Frontier kernel and other forward-looking projects. I want to be out of the business of avoiding flames, if possible. I wish the continuing members of the board the very best, and of course I will continue to be a huge booster of RSS and syndication technology, and I will offer my opinion, through this blog, naturally, as always.  

Steve Gillmor calls this "graduation day" for Dave. I like that. Thanks! 

The kudos are appreciated: Tristan Louis, Daniel Berlinger. 

Mark Bernstein: "Let's not drive the good people away; instead, let's get rid of these old pizza boxes." 

Shelley Powers: "People have stopped listening to me because I shout." 

AP: "Al-Qaida-linked terror groups and their sympathizers have in recent months made a big splash on the Internet, making it their communications channel of choice. They're benefiting from free discussion boards, e-mail accounts and other online forums for propaganda, recruitment, fund-raising and even planning." 

Scott Rosenberg: Blogs, bosses and bucks. 

Time's coolest website is Bloglines, a centralized RSS aggregator. 

BBC: "Users are being told to avoid using Internet Explorer until Microsoft patches a serious security hole in it. ...the list of compromised sites involves banks, auction and price comparison firms and is growing fast." 

InfoWorld: "Microsoft acknowledged Thursday that IIS, a component of the Windows 2000 Server, and holes in the Internet Explorer Web browser are being used in widespread attacks that are compromising Web pages and using them as launching pads for malicious computer code." 

Robert Scoble at Microsoft writes to ask that I point to their security site, which will be "updated all weekend long with the latest info." 

Last night was the last Thursday night meeting at Berkman that I'll chair. The group may go on, or may not. At this time it's not clear. When it came time to say goodbye, it was very emotional, in a nice way. I tried to remember all the people who had come through the weekly meetings, many of whom never met each other because their times didn't overlap. The meetings were "come as you are" and "we're just folks." I'm told this is unusual for Harvard. I like Harvard very much, but sometimes it's good to loosen the tie and just hang out. If the blogging at Berkman accomplished that, and opened up the university just a little, then it was an outrageous success. Most important are the friendships that were created around the process, far too many people for me to talk about, but you can be sure they'll appear in the pages of this blog as long as I am writing. People ask me what I'll do next. For that, let me quote myself: 

5/7/97: "When a friend changes you can find the bond that's connecting you at a deeper level. The surface stuff isn't a good thing to depend on. Physical bodies change as they grow. So do emotional bodies and intellectual ones. Take a deep breath. People move, life is more like a wild dance than a ceremony. You just can't tell what's coming next." 

Read that whole piece if you have the time. It's one of my best and it's stood the test of time, imho. 

Seattle Times reports that Bill Gates may start a weblog. "Bill's blog won't be all business." 

Tim Jarrett: "Being linked by Bill will become the holy grail of blogging at Microsoft and will somewhat diminish the thrill of getting linked by Scoble." 

Wired: "No matter how careful you are, one of these days you will get a spyware infestation." 

Watched The Fog of War starring former US Secretary of Defense, Robert MacNamara. More interesting than I thought it would be. One bit of history it revealed about the Vietnam war is that the enemy, the North Vietnamese, thought they were re-fighting a war for independence with colonial France, that's why they were such a fierce enemy. The US was fighting a war with the USSR and China to prevent communist dominance of all of southeast Asia and all small nations in the world. The famous Domino Theory. The former Vietnamese foreign minister reveals that they hated the Chinese, and had been at war with them for a thousand years. MacNamara says if they had known this, the Vietnam war never would have happened.