TagCamp

Just up the road from me, there's a little camp-out planned:  TagCamp.  I'd really love to go myself and roast some hot dogs, but with the Kid it's a bit difficult.  We'll see.  Hopefully we can at least send someone with some hot chocolate and pancakes.

Update: We're sending a posse to TagCamp:

EdwinAoki, SaileshDavuluri, SeanSu - Brainstorming ideas around tag spam, or SPAG.

And, we're helping out with dinner too.  Wish I could be there... I might manage a drop in at some point.  I hope Edwin or Sailesh or Sean will be event blogging.

Tags: TagCamp, SPAG.

AOL buys Weblogs Inc.

(Disclaimer:  I know nothing about this deal aside from what's in the news.)

Good coverage here.   The lines between traditional media and blogging are going to continue to blur.   And AOL is getting in on the ground floor.

Google Blog Search

More competition = healthier ecosystem.  The question really is, will Google entering this arena increase competition or decrease it (by cutting off the air supply of smaller competitors)?  On the third hand, the Google Blog Search is pretty basic so far and the real question is whether they'll continue to innovate and improve it (Google Maps) or let it mostly sit there (Google Groups, though that might be changing).

Some of the more relevant / useful links:
Dave Sifry's reaction: Google's entry validates the space.
Bob Wyman welcomes Google Blog Search because it complements PubSub. Though I think I'm a bit fuzzy on exactly what the distinction is.

Threadwatch has some technical details.
Commentary on Technorati vs. Google from WebProNews (Charlene Li's take).

The new Atom is here! The new Atom is here!

The Atom syndication format is pretty much baked; see http://atompub.org/ for the version 1.0 spec.  It'll take a while to get an RFC number and the vanity license plate, but barring typos it's final.

(Next step: Defining the general Atom protocol standard, which will enable interoperable use of Atom for things like blog editors.)

Blog This

With our latest rev of Journals, we've enabled a new Blog This feature.  You need a special "bookmarklet" to take advantage of it.  Since Journals prevents pages hosted on aol.com from hosting Javascript, I have to give the ugly Javascript code for the link in plain text:

javascript:q=""+(window.getSelection?window.getSelection():document.getSelection?
document.getSelection():document.selection.createRange().text);void(
window.open('http://journals.aol.com/_do/blog_this?js='+escape(document.title)+'&
je='+(q?escape('"'+q+'"'):escape(location.href)),'_top'))

Create a bookmark and copy and paste the Javascript URL above into the URL box. Then, select it when you're looking at a page you want to comment on.  It will bring you directly to an Add Entry page with a default title and text.  (If you select text on the original page first, it will copy that over automatically.)

New beta feaure: Journals panel

Cool new beta feature in AOL Explorer (http://beta.aol.com/projects/aolexplorer/index.html?): The Journals side panel.  I'm posting this from AOL Explorer right now.  Very nice.

This version lets you drag and drop selected text from the page you're viewing in the main browser tab.  Really handy for commenting on things!

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?)