It seems there is an open call for participation for the 2006 edition of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (ETech). Although I'm not in right demographic to be an ETech speaker since I don't work at a sexy Silicon Valley startup, I'm not a VP at a major software company and don't consider myself a Friend of O'Reilly, I plan to toss my hat in the ring and send in two talk proposals anyway.

1. What's Next for RSS, Atom and Content Aggregation: Currently the primary usage of content syndication technology like RSS has been consuming news and blog postings in desktop or web-based RSS readers. However the opportunities created by syndication technologies go much further than enabling us to keep up with Slashdot and Boing Boing in our RSS reader of choice. Podcasting is one manifestation of the new opportunities that arise once the concept of content syndication and aggregation is applied to domains outside of news sites and blogs. This talk will focus problem areas and scenarios oustde of blogs, news sites and traditional RSS readers that can benefit from the application of syndication technologies like RSS and Atom.

2. Bringing MSN into Web 2.0: The essence of Web 2.0 is moving from a Web consisting of Web pages and Web sites (Web 1.0) to a Web consisting of Web applications based on open data that are built on Web platforms. MSN hosts a number of properties from social software applications like MSN Spaces, Hotmail, MSN Groups and MSN Messenger which are used by hundreds of millions of people to communicate to software that enables people to find information they need such as MSN Search and MSN Virtual Earth. All of these applications. A number of these web sites are making the transition to becoming web platforms; MSN Virtual Earth has a Javascript API, MSN Search exposes search results as RSS feeds and MSN Spaces will support the MetaWeblog API which uses XML-RPC. This talk will focus on the current and future API offerings coming from MSN and give a behind the scenes look as to how some of these APIs came about from conception and getting sign off from the bean counters to technical details on building web services.

These are my first drafts of both proposals, criticisms are welcome. If they don't get accepted, I'll survive. Now that I've actually written the abstracts I can just keep submitting them to various conferences I'm interested in until they get accepted somewhere. In my experience, it usually takes about 2 or 3 submissions to get a talk accepted anyway.