Some thoughts on Microsoft's RSS announcements today:

The pieces being announced are a feed parsing library, a common (OS wide) subscriptions list, and a Creative Commons licensed spec for RSS extensions that let an application treat an RSS feed as an ordered list. None of these are rocket science, but on the whole, if you are a platform vendor, this is exactly the kind of stuff that you'd expect to see. In my mind, the most important aspect of the announcement is that it lends credibility to the notion of using RSS to deliver data to applications, which is an idea that I've been fond of for some time.

I think that the Creative Commons licensing of a spec is a big step for Microsoft. It remains to be seen if there will actually be give and take with the rest of the world or not, but at least it is a first step.

Initial impressions of Gnomedex:

I like the small feel. I'm ambivalent about the single track format -- not having to run around to sessions is good, but running around to sessions also leads to running into interesting people. It's also a different experience to be at a conference where product announcements are being made in the presentations. This isn't really something that happens at my other favorite small conferences, PyCon and ApacheCon. Not a plus or minus, just different. At one point in my career was going to conferences with announcements. I've just been living in a different world for a while, I guess.

I've met a number of people that I wanted to meet in person, as well as some of the folks reading this blog. Special mention to Mike of HackingNetflix - we don't subscribe to netflix yet, but Mike has been able to influence Netflix to add RSS feeds, and has generally been doing a great job of covering Netflix. If we do end up subscribing to Netflix (it's "in the plan"), it will be due in some degree to Mike. Via their interaction with Mike, Netflix has shown that it's a company that wants to have a conversation with its customers, and those are the kinds of companies that I prefer to do business with (and yes, I'm willing to pay a premium for that).