Dave Winer is going to giving a talk at Microsoft Research tomorrow. Robert Scoble has is organizing a lunch before the talk with some folks at MSFT and Dave. I may or may not make it since my mom's visiting from Nigeria and I was planning to take most of the week off. Just in case, I miss it there is one thing I'd like Dave to know; most of the problems in the XML-based website syndication space could have been solved if he didn't act as if once he wrote a spec or code for the Radio Userland aggregator then it was impossible to change. Most of the supposed “problems” with RSS would take 30 minutes to fix in the spec and about a day to fix in the Radio Userland codebase (I'm making assumptions here based on how long it would take in the RSS Bandit codebase). Instead he stonewalled and now we have the ATOM mess. Of course, we'd still need something like the ATOM effort to bring the blogging APIs into the 21st century but we wouldn't have to deal with incompatibilities at the website syndication level as well.
In a recent blog post Dave mentions that his MSR talk will mainly be about the themes from his article Howard Dean is not a soap bar. I don't really have an opinion on the content one way or the other but I did dislike the way he applies selective memory to prove a point specifically
In the lead-up to the war in Iraq, for some reason, people who were against the war didn't speak.
Maybe they didn't speak on the East coast but there was a very active anti-War movement on the West coast especially in the Seattle area. Actually they did speak out on the East Coast as well, in fact hundreds of thousands of voices all over the US and all over the world spoke out.
It's makes me view the “blogs are the second coming” hype with suspicion when it's boosters play fast and loose with the facts to sell their vision.