Microsoft Embraces RSS

Quick post:  That Microsoft was going to be doing something serious about syndication was a foregone conclusion.  That they're extending RSS 2.0 to support ordered lists (?) isn't the big news, IMHO.  That they're integrating per-user subscription support into their forthcoming platform is more significant.  They Get It; syndication is a platform, they have a team dedicated to RSS, and the thing that's really important to control is personal subscription data.

(The big question is, how long will we be waiting for Longhorn?)

Supernova: Guten Tag

Kevin Marks gave an introduction to tagging and even better, put it up online.  So now I can point people there instead of stumbling through explanations myself.  Cool.

On a side note, I've been behind on blogging and missed congratulating Technorati on their cool new look & features.  I managed to show their new consolidated tag search to an executive yesterday -- searching for tags popped up not only posts, but photos from buzznet and flickr.  It was a great way to point out the utility of interoperability.

Kevin made a good point about cognitive load.  The cost of applying a tag needs to be near-zero.  The iPhoto keywords feature is a great anti-example.

The ecosystem is jumping all over tags.  LiveJournal added support for tags last week.  The Mac "ecto" tool now has tag support as well.  Oh yes -- upcoming.org does hCalendar; evdb does hCalendar and hCard. Note to self: Check all these out soon.

I do think people are waving their hands a bit around authorization and authentication, especially when Tanenbaum talks about an ecosystem of services.  Do I just give all these services all of my usernames and passwords?  How do I know I can trust some of these little fly-by-night web services with my private information?  Also, Marty, please, please don't curse this by invoking AI.  

In the future, I'll Google "concerts in the next week" and get not just websites but a consolidated, sortable list of events from all sources.

Best comment of the session (rough quote) from John Seely Brown:  "You're doing pragmatics as well as semantics and that's why you'll win."

Supernova: Microformats

An excellent workshop primarily because it was a demonstration of pragmatic solutions.  I've been just slightly involved with some of the microformat work and I've been looking for resources to help build mindshare at AOL.  The microformats.org web site announced here is exactly what I need.  And now I see that Tantek has put his excellent introduction up there.  Go look!

What I like about microformats:  Start simple and focused.  Evolve rapidly.  Borrow like crazy. Keep things human readable.  Decentralize completely.  Get real world experience.  Microformats like tags, hCalendar, and hReview are simple enough (and built on infrastructure that's solid enough) to let the community build interoperable services.

Best part for users:  Microformats are based on XHTML.  Which means they're human readable HTML as far as users are concerned.  No weird XML gobbledygook, no strange attachments, no extra files to cart around.

Specifics:  hCalendar is great because it's just vCalendar mapped to XHTML.  There was a great demo of a service which turns an hCalendar link into an vCalendar data stream automatically; I'm now subscribed to Tantek's calendar through this service. hReview is based on what people are publishing on the web today, just adding some markup so machines can see the semantics.

Tools are starting to pop up.  There's a Greasemonkey script for doing hCalendar in any text box.  Movable Type is adding support for writing hReviews.  Next step will be services like Technorati and Google paying attention to the semantics.

Next topic was tags, the uber-microformat (or nanoformat).  It'll have to wait for the next post, though.  Need to get some sleep.

Going Supernova

I took the train up to San Francisco to the Supernova conference, which let me experiment with using my cell phone as a Bluetooth modem.  Given that I was sitting on a rapidly moving train, I expected this to be a dancing bear, but it actually worked pretty well for around 40 minutes -- until the train went into a set of tunnels near the end of the trip.  Speed wasn't great but was adequate for email.  Major problem was actually vibration.

I went to Monday's Connected Work workshop mainly in hopes of getting some insights into collaboration trends.  Not too many surprises -- blogs and wikis  everywhere, of course.  Some good points about the need to not lock down things too tightly (heresy to traditional IT departments) because your breakthrough ideas usually come from cross-fertilization.  Quote: "98% of everything should be visible to everyone in the company."  Hear, hear.

How Not to Get Hired

Just a tip from a hiring manager here.  If your resume starts out with the heading "SUMMMARY", I'm highly likely to toss it in the trash.  Not because I want to hire people who can use spell checkers, but because to me it indicates that you either can't or won't be bothered with details.  Or that you consider how you present information unimportant.

If you're in the top 1% of coders, maybe you can get away with this.  Otherwise, please run a spell checker on your resume before sending it in.

(I'm a really nice guy so I finished reading the resume; the rest was just as bad, though.)