Turning over a new leaf in the battle between RSS and ATOM, Dave Winer has proposed a meeting of the minds to hopefully determine the future of the competing content syndication technologies.

if a new proposal by the co-author of the popular RSS (define) format catches on, it won't matter; both would merge into one protocol under a new proposal, a move that could nip the argument over the competing formats in the bud.

Dave Winer, a central figure behind the push for mainstream RSS adoption, has now proposed a merger with the newer Atom standard, insisting "it's time to bury the hatchet and move on."

Winer announced his proposal in a Weblog post on Tuesday and urged developers to put their heads together in order to come up with a backwards-compatible format to avoid confusion and bring the two competing standards together.

Lets hope this happens, because if both sides get to the table and walk away empty handed, the war will escalate and then things will really get ugly.

Check out this post over at Doug Murrays, a line in the sand.  In a recent and very quiet update posted on Windows Update, Microsoft modified a symbol font to remove "inappropriate" symbols from the font set. 

I learned that one of them would update the Bookshelf Symbol 7 font, removing unspecified symbols deemed "inappropriate." This sounded so critical, I had to find out more.

These two were not surprising. Apparently Winston Smith Gates thinks if we eliminate the symbols, the nasty reality they symbolize goes away. If that's the intent, then removing the third symbol is disturbing, indeed.

Update: Maybe this explains dropping the Star of David.

A bit further down, someone posted the following link to an article on ABCs web site defending the removal.

Microsoft is facing some questions about political correctness and fonts this week following the release of a critical Windows update that also happens to include a previously released font removal tool.

and then…

Microsoft Office product manager Simon Marks also confirmed in an interview with PC Magazine that the Star of David was removed from the font set because, he says, the physical proximity of the Star of David to the swastikas in the font set upset some users.

"If you went in a font tool to look at how the font was laid out — a character map — the Star of David was within one or two characters of the swastikas," he says. "We already ship the Star of David within other fonts we make available so we didn't want to cause any more potential offense."

Marks also added that there are international issues of legality regarding the use of Nazi symbols. "We're a multi-national company and there are countries where Nazi and neo-Nazi symbology is illegal, so we need to be aware of that," he said.

Who's going to BloggerCon 2004?

Good morning! I'm pleased to announce that we will hold our second BloggerCon on April 17, 2004 at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, MA. We would be very happy if you could join us.

The timing of this BloggerCon is at a turning point in the US political process. The first conference was held in October 2003, when the new excitement about the use of the Internet in the Presidential campaign was front and center. Now it's time, between the primaries and the conventions, to take stock, in time to apply what we've learned in the subsequent stages of the election. There will also, of course, be sessions on blogging in journalism, education, science and tutorials for people who are new to blogging. It's a user's conference about technology, it's not a meeting where technology amazes, rather it's a forum for the use of technology.

The cost to attend is $0. Please register at the URL below, so we can plan for the number of participants, and to communicate with people who will be there.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/bloggerCon/II/register

The format of the conference is four concurrent tracks of 1.5 hour sessions, moderated by a discussion leader. There are no panels. Each room will have experts and leaders, most of whom would be excellent panelists. The job of the moderator is to assemble a story by calling on the people at his or her disposal. They're like reporters putting together a story, but you get to hear, first hand what the experts are saying, in their own voices. Think of Dan Gillmor's adage that the people who read his weblog are much smarter than he is — that's also the philosophy of BloggerCon.

Registration starts at 8AM, the sessions start at 9AM and conclude at 5PM. We will have a party, sponsored by Adam Curry and myself on Saturday night. Remember the cost to attend is $0. If you want to make a contribution so we can have refreshments or help fund the party, or contribute your time, we will welcome that. ;->

The amount of money that spammers spend to actually distribute their trash is trivial to the amount we currently spend on blocking them.  But let's imagine for one second that we could come to an agreement with spammers.  Let's imagine a world in which we charged a spammer a very small amount to send us a message.  I'm not talking about the Microsoft approach in which a spammer's server incurs the cost and Microsoft makes more money on the back end.  Stop being so cynical for one second and imagine a Utopia in which good things happen to good people, bad people get their due and business operate with integrity.  heh!! I know…right!?!?!?

Well, for argument sake, I'm talking about micro payments.

Forgetting for one moment about the complexity of such a system which clearly isn't trivial, (remember we're in Utopia) but what if you had a policy attached to your e-mail that said if a 3rd party wants to send you unsolicited e-mail, they have to pay you.  Let's be realistic now because under the current system, it costs them little, but they get even little in return.  So, how much would make it worth your while to open that e-mail and read it, maybe clicking on a link to confirm a micro-transaction.  How much would they have to pay you? One cent per message, 5 cents per message?  How much?  Just don't forget that this had to be realistic for the spammers as well.  They have a business to run also.

Here's where I'm going.  If there is a demographic of people out there that might accept a trivial amount of money in return for seeing ads for Viagra or online casinos and they are a demographic that might actually spend money on such products or services, than maybe…just maybe spammers would be less inclined to send mail to people who don't give a crap.  Maybe they would be willing to spend the 1 or 2 ocents per message to reach people who might actually consider buying what it is they were selling, instead of reaching out to a million people, to hit 1000 whose e-mails actually exist and open the message and maybe 5 actually buy something. My numbers may be off, but I think you get my point.

Post your comments in the comments section below so we can all discuss.

I guess it was just a matter of time, but here is the first online ATOM to RSS feed translator service. I haven't tested this out in detail, only on my own personal ATOM feed which appears to work but is a bit flakey…the pain of living on the bleeding edge is invigorating. I'm generating an ATOM 0.3 feed from MT 2.661 for those of you who care.

I can see this being a helpful service for those who want to broaden the scope of feeds they provide, but whose blog host (read Blogger.com) isn't cooperating. Let us know if you think that this is the sort of service you would want to take advantage of or if you are planning on abandoning RSS in favor of ATOM altogether.

Dave Winer, creator of RSS, comments on whether or not to support ATOM.

Scott Young, CEO at UserLand asked what I thought they should be doing re RSS and Atom.

Here's what I said. I don't know, I've been thinking about it of course.

The problem is there are going to be multiple versions of Atom. By supporting it now, are you committing to keeping up with all the changes? In many ways it's easier to stay out of the fray and let things settle down.

I guess the key questions are — are you:

1. Getting any user requests for Atom support?

2. If so, are you losing any sales because you don't yet have it?

Personally, I'm not missing it. The only feeds that aren't also available in RSS are two very marginal ones, that rarely update and mostly are irritating, not informative. Also personally, I'd much rather have some news about Manila. Let's change the subject from format changes, which mean nothing to users, to features, which do.

Microsoft's MSDN service has entered the *RSS* fray at version 2.0.

Based on feedback from you, our customers, MSDN has recently released RSS feeds. Before rolling them out, however, we wanted to ensure that we had a sustainable, reliable model for getting the feeds out to you, our developers. We also wanted to make sure we made smart choices around RSS versions, and talked with as many people as possible before arriving at the decision to implement with RSS 2.0. We hope you find the feeds useful, and we look forward to delivering more of these kinds of services to the development community in the future.

Thanks to Scripting News for pointing this out.

Looks like the folks at Disney have picked up on the use of blogs and wiki's in the enterprise.  Check out Ross Mayfield excellent write up of the talk at ETCon.

Mike Pusateri, Elisabeth Freeman and Eric Freeman at Disney shares their enterprise blogging initative. Its very similar to the experience we have had with Socialtext, without the integration of blog and wiki with enterprise requirements in mind. The focus on blogging for project communication instead of just individual expression is spot on.

Here's a great find…use this little ditty to remove lots of hidden data from your documents before you send them.  You can read more about it on Microsoft's web site or just download it and read the included documentation.  Enjoy.

With this add-in you can permanently remove hidden data and collaboration data, such as change tracking and comments, from Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft PowerPoint files.

Types of data this add-in can remove

• All data removed by the application's Remove Personal Information feature. For more information on this feature, please search for "Remove Personal Information" in the application Help. This data is removed automatically.

• Comments. This data is removed automatically.

Dave Pollard on the fatal flaws of first generation Social Networking sites and tools.

They're built with a pre-designed, set content architecture, and centrally-stored content, instead of harvesting content that individual users already have stored, in different ways of their own choosing, on their own machines.

They're being populated just-in-case, with all kinds of content that people with lots of time on their hands see fit to contribute, and no content from the very busy or technologically illiterate, rather than just-in-time, with content being accumulated only if and when there's a demand and need for it.

They're badly over-engineered, ranging in complexity from challenging to intimidating, so they take a lot of time, energy and intelligence to understand and use properly, and hence drive most potential users away.

Six tips to better RSS feeds provided by Gene Smith.

Write a great headline.

Include the full article or a summary.

Don't cut off your articles

Be Consistent

Use RSS 2.0

Link to your comments

The bottom line though is that nothing trumps plain old good writing.

I didn't really know where to post this, but it just made me laugh all over again.  It seems like every year some big name corporation (last year it happened to Microsoft and it got plenty of press) forgets to renew their domain name registration.  Well this year, its the Washington Post.  For any of you who own domain names, you know how trivial this can be…but try working for a multi-billion dollar organization and getting a $29.99 purchase order cut. 

These days, many reporters rely on email in order to interview people and find out information for stories. What do they do when their email system disappears, though? Perhaps we should ask the reporters at the Washington Post who discovered that their email addresses no longer worked after someone forgot to renew their washpost.com domain name, which they use for email. Considering the new registration requirements for the WashingtonPost.com, I wonder if this means the reporters couldn't read their own site

Thanks to Brian Weaver over at Ryze for a post about FloodMT (http://terrato.org/index.pl?FloodMT) a flood "testing" application.  LOL…testing!! I LOVE IT!

FloodMT is the first integrated solution for testing Movable Type blogs for working anti-spamming features. It can also be used to check the effectiveness of plugins such as MT-Blacklist and ClearComments. It has been tested with Movable Type 2.6, and should even work with version 2.66 if a sufficient number of proxies are used.

Written in the procedural programming paradigm, FloodMT is a multithreaded script compatible with Python 2.2 and onwards, using only core libraries. It is the ideal solution for Movable Type crapflooders, scalable across the enterprise and all other applications. A port to Haskell is being considered.

Is anyone surprised by this?

A survey released this week by a group of European and U.S. consumer organizations showed widespread support for tough spam-fighting laws.

The poll by Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue, which represents 65 consumer groups in Europe and the United States, found that 81 percent of respondents in both areas supported laws requiring permission before sending commercial e-mail. And 80 percent said that unsolicited commercial e-mail should be labeled as advertising.

I suppose something like this is neccessary in order for goverments to respond to the masses, but for god sake…did they actually think that we'd prefer to Opt-out instead?

Read more about this report on our post on the effects of spam on e-business and also get the detailed results.

There's a new type of spam on the horizon and it's coming to an RSS aggregator near you.  The newest type of spam that we can expect to start seeing in coming months will be RSS and ATOM spam.  Essentially this means that RSS and ATOM feeds will likely start containing paid advertising slots distributed to those who subscribe.

I see a few reasons why this won't be a successful advertising stream.  First, RSS is arguably not a mature technology and therefore it's adoption will be limited.  That said, as more and more ATOM feeds and ATOM compatible consumers (aggregators, etc…) come online, we are likely to see more of this targeted advertising.  Even so, the number is still fairly small, therefore while a valuable demographic is being delivered, the medium is wrong and the market not yet developed.

Second, as with other types of "spam", it will be largely ignored.  In addition to the reasons mentioned above, consumers of RSS / ATOM services generally don't hear about new products or services through paid advertising, they get their information through website reviews, from specialized blogs and other bloggers and commentors on those specialized blogs.

Further, most RSS/ATOM subscribers, at least today, are mainly techies and abhor spam.  Therefore they will do everything they can to stop it.  We will likely see attempts from the developers of RSS/ATOM aggregation products and services to deliver new features to block advertising, pseudo pop-up blockers that will suppress the advertising slots.  But again, if this plays out anything like E-mail spam, this will be a cat and mouse game as well.

Finally, the most popular blogs, the blogs that deliver the largest number of desirable users will likely be against very invasive advertising.  Google AdWords and small ad's in the sidebars of most blogs have become accepted.  However, I think that efforts to turn blogs into commercial endeavors will undermine their integrity and therefore erode the demographic they were initially meant to target.

It is the opinion of this blogger that the most effective ads will be run on sites that are very niche in terms of subject matter and don't play favorites to one advertiser or another.  Instead the blogs will deliver this demographic because of intelligent reviews and balanced commentary.  This will lead to more educated consumers and better products.