Health reform politics in 106 chars 

Just like there are no atheists in foxholes there are no Republicans who are uninsured and critically ill.

How open standards are created 

Marco at Tumblr says that he was inspired by the "seriously clever" use of the Twitter API by WordPress. Of course I was too. When they came out with it I wondered out loud if the Twitter API is now an open standard.

Well, less than a week later, Tumblr now has implemented the Twitter API, and as a result you can use any Twitter-compatible tool to post to and read from Tumblr.

Marco's post explains.

Let's pause here to let that sink in.

Wow. Unbelievable. Fantastic. Awesome.

Conventional wisdom says that open standards are created by endless deliberations among experts and big tech companies, and those do sometimes gain traction.

But this is how it usually happens: Someone goes first. No one thinks of it as an open standard. Then someone clones it. All of a sudden people get ideas. Inspired, someone goes third. At this point it's inevitable that there will be a fourth and fifth and so on.

It's also inevitable that Twitter tools vendors will start testing their products with WordPress and Tumblr, and hopefully report bugs and have them fixed.

And the brilliant minds of the developers and users of WordPress and Tumblr will have their say in the evolution of this new art.

All of a sudden things are exciting again!!

PS: If Facebook were to implement the Twitter API that would be it. We'd have another FTP or HTTP or RSS.