RSS, OPML and the XML platform.
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MyDeathSpace.com had an outage yesterday caused by their hosting service thinking they were under a DDOS attack. When in fact, it was all the buzz that was generating enormous amounts of legit traffic.
MyDeathSpace is a blog and forum for tracking MySpace profiles of dead people. They've had quite a few outages in their first year.
If you look deep enough into your Google Maps, then you may find an hCard; microformatted address cards. It's like looking at an Atom and finding an electron.
http://googlemapsapi.blogspot.com/2007/06/microformats-in-google-maps.html
Mefeedia has a great summary of the video blogosphere (vlogosphere). They are reporting 4,000 new blogs per day.
Can you hear it? That noise. That background noise. It doesn't make a sound, but it's definately there. I never heard the Internet before, but 2007 brought noise to the Internet. Noise. It's all the chatter. The twittering. The facebook status updates. The MySpace messages. It's getting loud.
It started with blogging. Thanks Dave! Then it was social networks and instant messaging. Add widgets. Now, I couldn't imagine camping without an Internet connection. The noise is like a soothing voice telling me that we are not alone. We have friends 10,000 miles away that know I'm camping, I'm working, I'm playing soccer with my daughter. She scored two goals! We all won.
The rest of your post is right. The big companies, including Google, are trying to take control of RSS, and itâs in contradiction to the roadmap, and just plain wrong. Iâve asked them to stop, and so far theyâve ignored the request. Thanks for raising the issue publicly.
http://scobleizer.com/2007/07/22/feedburner-bad-for-us/#comment-808412
Google is trying to take control of RSS? Let's get this straight. Google's member on the RSS Advisory Board is Eric Lunt. He worked for FeedBurner. If Google didn't buy FeedBurner, then they wouldn't even have one member on the board. And I securely doubt membership on the RSS Advisory Board had anything to do with Google's purchase of FeedBurner. Previously, Jason Shellen, a member of the board, was employed by Google, but that's no longer true. Neither Eric Lunt nor Jason Shellen have been overly active on the RSS Advisory Board. Almost all the activities of the board are public and available on the website and message boards. The only private activities is nominating and voting for new members. Everybody has the ability to scour those boards and what you'll find is that Eric and Jason have been completely passive members of the board. So, how are they trying to control RSS? They aren't. It's just more propaganda from Dave Winer.
Further, we have tried multiple times to include Dave Winer in the process at his own request. He's even proposed that he be a member of the board. In every case where we've tried to compromise, Dave simply broke off contact when a compromise was close. Dave has never responded to any of my private emails to move the compromise forward, nor have any of the board members indicated to me that he's sent them a private email. I've indicated to him that all the members have public profiles and can be contacted directly. Dave requested permission to post on the board mailing list in order to address the members. I offered to post whatever he wanted on the board mailing list and he never replied. Dave is all about propaganda and deception. He lies and somehow his posse continues to fall for his ploy. I'm losing respect for that posse.
I woke up this morning to a lot of referrer traffic for the search terms LiveJournal down. It appears that a power outage took out LiveJournal, Vox and Typepad yesterday afternoon. There's more information on the Six Apart blogs.
http://www.sixapart.com/about/news/2007/07/power_outages_t.html
http://everything.typepad.com/blog/2007/07/typepad-status-.html
http://team.vox.com/library/post/vox-down-time.html
http://news.livejournal.com/101880.html
Some people want you to believe that the RSS Advisory Board is unofficial and doesn't have the mandate to make clarifications to the RSS specification. I thought it would be great to create a time-line of the RSS Advisory Board. So that you can read the history yourself, thru blog entries, many from the horses mouth, Dave Winer's blogs.
Nowhere was there ever any announcement that the RSS Advisory Board ceased to exist. Rogers Cadenhead was a member of the board along side Dave Winer and has been on the board ever since. None of the members other than Dave Winer have ever suggested that the board discontinued at any point and Dave only after the fact. Dave is simply upset with the direction of the RSS Advisory Board since he quit on his own terms. So now, he claims the RSS Advisory Board doesn't exist, as if his blog can change history itself.
http://scobleizer.com/2007/07/22/feedburner-bad-for-us/
All in all, this is very disappointing of Robert. I suspect that he was fed the propaganda from Dave Winer and he was likely completely misinformed of the truth.
Disclaimer: I am a member of The RSS Advisory Board. I also created a website r-mail.org, which was purchased by NBC (a BigCo). I am on temporary contract to transition the website to NBC, but I am not an employee of any company. I'm a professional RV Blogger.
I've been around this business a long time, and I was sure their strategy was to sell to a bigger company, and I don't trust big companies. [cut] So now someone at Google "owns" Feedburner and all their feeds. And they could, if they wanted to, change the feeds to another format, overnight, without asking anyone.
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/07/21/whyFeedburnerIsTrouble.html
Wow, classic Winer. Here's another way of spelling Winer; W-E-B-L-O-G-S-.-C-O-M. Weblogs.com was Dave's little non-profit piece of the blogosphere that he extracted from his old company Userland. Another way of spelling Winer is V-E-R-I-S-I-G-N. That's the company he sold his little start-up website and critical piece of the blogosphere to. So, somehow, it's all evil that Google now owns FeedBurner and has the power to screw their users. As we all know, Google's philosophy is to buy start-ups and screw their users over. But it's all good when Dave sells his website for $millions to a BigCo called Verisign that is known to be pure evil. Remember that it was Verisign that redirected domain lookup misses to their own search engine. The only thing I can add is a new spelling of Winer.
Dave Winer wonders "what about an Event? How would you represent that in a RSS item?"
http://www.scripting.com/stories/2007/07/20/representingPownceDataInRs.html
There's already many solutions, but nothing has stuck. Someone wrote an RDF event RSS module. There's also Microformats' hCalendar. But I suspect the best solution is an iCal extension for RSS. Is anybody doing this?
Dave Winer has asked the community for some nitpicking on his OPML 2.0 spec. I'm giving it a shot.
The year 2007 has already seen two great Web 2.0 start-ups makes breakthroughs. I'm sure there are more, but I wanted to speak to these in particular. After tremendous starts that gave them 0.15% reach, both start-ups appear to have stalled (at least according to the imperfect Alexa).
I've also noticed that MyBlogLog has completely disappeared from my radar (nobody is talking about it) and Twitter has started to fade. Both MyBlogLog and Twitter grew within the tech geek community. I've always had the opinion that website that grow in the tech geek community can grow quickly at first and stall. This seems to confirm that opinion.
Last night, talking with my niece, she tells me that she's not too happy with Facebook anymore. She doesn't like all these applications. I think it's clear that Facebook applications have created the latest spurt of Facebook growth, but I wonder if that's not tech geek community driven and therefor doomed to stall.
The draft of the RSS Profile has been updated with a new recommendation for how aggregators should implement the TTL element.
OPML 2.0 now has a namespace, at least for use as a vocabulary in other XML containers. Dave Winer selected http://www.opml.org/spec2 as the namespace URI and has already implemented it in his TwitterGram project. Here's a sample.
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:opml2="http://www.opml.org/spec2">Vlad Akilov ranked five of the most popular RSS readers.
Read his full reviews.
Kent Newsome wants to know why RSS items can only have only one enclosure.
http://www.newsome.org/2007/07/educating-kent-single-rss-enclosure.shtml
A MySpace user discovered that they have a album Web service. I haven't tried it myself, but it appears functional. This is an interesting development on the back of their RSS feeds going AWOL.
http://media.myspace.com/services/media/albums.asmx
Around the Blogosphere...
I've been informed that MySpace RSS feeds have been broken since late June. MySpace support has been informed of the problem, but there has been no response from them as to why or if it'll get fixed. I just checked mine and it's 404 (not found).
Around the blogosphere.
I was one of the first people to get a Flickr account. This was long before the Yahoo! takeover. Over the years, I uploaded thousands of personal photos and used them in blog posts and more. After Yahoo! bought Flickr, the Uploadr stopped working and the support team was unable help me. Yahoo! had given me two years free because I was an early pro-user, but eventually even that wore off. A few months ago, I got an email saying I had to renew my membership. Since Flickr no longer worked for me, I decided not to renew. I didn't even bother reading the fine print either, but I assume it said in there that if I didn't renew, they were going to delete all my previous photos and they did. So, if you are a pro Flickr power-user, then you will have to pay them an annual amount, which they are free to increase, every year for the rest of eternity or you lose all your uploads. Everything. The comments. The photosets. Suckers! You want evil? Don't look at Google. Look to Sunnyvale.
BTW, after the photos were deleted, the Uploadr started working again. I can only assume it was related to the volume of photos I had.
Last, I was working on a Flickr widget when I discovered just how evil Yahoo! is. It works and you are free to use it, but I won't be building any more Flickr tools in the future. Basically, it takes a Flickr PhotoSet and creates an HTML slideshow. I was gonna call it the FlickrSetShow.
FeedBurner's premium MyBrand service is now free. This service allows you to host FeedBurner feeds on your own domain.