I know that Dave Winer and many others have been working on subscription harmonizers to let people keep up with their feeds when they are away from their main computers. That's a good solution and one that will work for many people. But in the long run, I don't think it will work for me. Right now my RSS feeds and the metadata that goes with them (like which articles I read, liked, saved, and so on) are stuck in my aggregator (this month, that's FeedDemon). What I'd really like is for my RSS info to be integrated and intertwined with my personal information space. That's one thing.

The thing that really motivated this post was that I want to keep up with feeds during OSCON, but the wireless net is bound to be overloaded with so many people here. So I want to read offline. But I can't read offline if all people put in their feeds are a title and short description.

Just some more thoughts on why feeds should have all the content of the entries in them.

After a 4 hour drive, I've arrived at OSCON in one piece. Patrick Logan and I met for real, had some dinner and talked a little about our insta-BOF tomorrow night. Should be fun. As an added treat, I got to meet Kevin Altis, who is chaining the Python track. I bumped into Kevin the the Chandler IRCs, so it was an added bonus to meet him tonight.

If you're at OSCON, there will be a series of BOFs on the topics roughly encompassed by Patrick's post this morning and my post last night.

Check the OSCON Wiki for the details.

Gary Lawrence Murphy's critique of Echo turned interesting when he said "We're asking the wrong questions", and then started to describe "a distributed, human-edited blogsearch". I can imagine a few uses for something like that right now. It sounds like a good substrate for for the RSS based replacement for PapersInvited.com that I proposed a few days ago. It also sounds like just the thing for that "subversive, anti-JCP, pro open-source, customer confusing" community that I've been bandying about with Andy and Jason. And here's a big 8-) for anyone who decides they want to get miffed about any of the adjectives I used in the quoted part of that last sentence.

Phil Wolff is Mister Microcontent.

In this post he tackles the issue of managing microcontent using an e-mail program. That'd be ok if all e-mail programs didn't suck. I prefer to think of it in reverse; e-mail is just another kind of microcontent -- although here I may be stretching the term from the meaning that Anil Dash already gave it.

Earlier in the week Phil commented in Anil's blog, pointing to the links on Sam's wiki regarding Component Blogs and the Adaptive Blogosphere. After which we've truly veered off from Dash's definition. If you follow this reasoning then you come to a startling conclusion. Echo and RSS are just SOAP with some predefined headers. If the world ends up going down the adaptive blog route, then the syndication format becomes a framing format for the "real content". So essentially, this is like OpenDoc for the web. That's going to raise a few hairs.

Krzysztof Kowalczyk has figured out that Chandler has the potential to become the ultimate micro content client. If you believe in Phil's email-like microcontent manager (and you believe that Chandler won't suck), then the conclusion is obvious. Krzysztof's reasoning about webs of microcontent insinuated and augmented with one's personal information is just fuel for the fire. Chandler's design around Parcels give it the ability to act like an OpenDoc style container for microcontent components.

I can't wait to meet the Chandler team this week.