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Dave has an interesting story:

The first clue that something weird was happening at Microsoft around RSS was when Sean Lyndersay picked me up for dinner on the first night of my visit. I asked what part of Microsoft he worked for. He said he was on the RSS Team. I gulped. You mean there's an RSS Team at Microsoft? Yeah there is.

Update: You know what's ridiculous? CNET publishing this story about Dave's scoop. The story is inferior to Dave's post in every way: longer, less informative, uncontextualized, less fun to read, and surrounded by ads. Yet it contains only a tiny excerpt and one nearly-invisible link to Dave's story. Since Dave is the source, why not just link prominently and quote without worthless wholesale paraphrasing?

I know. The answer has something to do with the reporter's training and other cultural experience in a medium that rewards novelty, where scoops and angles made sense.

This sort of writing is not useful anymore. Writers, figure this out.

Intimacy is being seen and known as the person you truly are.
— Amy Bloom

At a discussion led by David Weinberger a few months ago, I realized that I find social software appealing because, like many structures and conventions in offline discourse, it fosters development of a certain honest closeness between people. The word to describe this is intimacy, and one of my favorite things about online discussion is the diversity of ways that intimacy arises.

In meatspace, intimacy comes from family relations, friendship, working relationships, and romance. The patterns that establish intimacy are characterized by repeated interaction with increasing ability to reveal oneself without inhibition. In our most intimate relationships, we tend to be generous, forgiving, attentive, and considerate. We are rewarded for these efforts by partners who weild significant emotional and intellectual leverage over our selves, yet exercise this leverage with care that ensures help, not hurt.

By these definitions, a blog is obviously an intimacy engine. I openly share my opinions, values, joys, sorrows, etc.; and you respond with specific criticism, forgive my occassional idiocy or inconsideration, and share in my happiness and my pain. Some bloggers and blog readers have become friends and colleagues, but all take part in a process of intimacy development at a novel, wonderful pace and scale.

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Gmane is a mailing-list-to-news gateway. News here means good old USENET news, accessed via NNTP. Mail-to-news gateways have been built before, but gmane is interesting because it is bidirectional—you can post via usenet and have it funneled into the mailing list. You can also read and post via a the web using a threaded interface (example) or a blog-style interface (example) complete with RSS.

Gmane is focused on communications about free software, but it's also the most comprehensive cross-media threading system I've seen. The world will be a better place when conversations can start in email, move into mailing lists, web forums, and blogs, and provide access to the whole thread from any entry point.

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John Battelle follows up on the Bloglines acquisition by Ask Jeeves. The companies made their official announcements today.

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Bloglines has a pretty mild level of lock-in, it's true. Thanks to export OPML, it's fairly easy to take your data to another aggregator. Even this hassle, however, is not negligible. If Bloglines has cornered the market for people seeking a simple, easy-to-access, no-installation-required aggregator, many of their customers might indeed not care to figure out what OPML means. Additionally, they have the usual lock-in that results from users being accustomed to a certain interface.

Also, as Mary points out, the historical archive of blog posts that Bloglines has is pretty valuable. I would say especially so for a search engine.

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Mary Hodder has the scoop. This is an interesting story for two reasons: it could have strong effects on the blog dot-coms, and it's a great example of a company that was built to be sold.

Effects on the blog dot-coms: Bloglines has a large user base, rivalled in size and service lock-in only by LiveJournal. Although the interface emphasizes the aggregator, Bloglines is also designed to support a fast and excellent blog search engine. Coupled with the extensive data Bloglines has about who reads what, Ask Jeeves has just acquired a wealth of information that can help them produce better search results.

Built to be sold: Mark Fletcher, who previously built and sold ONEList (now Yahoo! groups), knows something about acquisitions. He built Bloglines to be scalable from the start; I've never heard of it being slow or inaccessible. I'd guess it's not going to be hard to tweak its interfaces to the new brand. I am curious about the Bloglines (or parent company, Trustic) employees—are they mostly contractors, with no promise of long-term employment? Have they been compensated with equity in anticipation of a liquidity event? Did they just move to Ask Jeeves? Or did they just get laid off while Fletcher pocketed $N million dollars?

Oh yeah, it would be interesting to know how much Mr. Jeeves paid. I'm pretty sure Bloglines wasn't in any hurry to get sold, and I think it's worth a lot to a search engine company. Yahoo bought ONEList for $432M in stock, but that was in 2000; that stock would now be worth about $277M. Adjusting for hype and a hazy notion of comparative value, I'd guess Bloglines garnered $30-50M. But I'm hoping we'll get more information.

Lisa Williams is at Berkman talking about blog policies. She says they're important and useful to have before they become necessary. So here's mine:

1. I write about the Free software I write (frassle, this blogging system), various more and less nerdy things that interest me, and my life as a geek in Boston. Don't get all uppity about it, if that's even possible.
2. Blogs (comments) that are spam will be deleted without notice.
3. I do not speak for my employer (Kronos Incorporated).
4. I make minor spelling, grammar, formatting, and link corrections to posts without notice. Changes that significantly affect the meaning of a post are either clearly separated from the original post as an addendum, or are their own post.
5. I hope you'll correct me and share your insight after listening to what I say.
6. I screw up.
7. You're welcome to quote or otherwise make use of material I post here. It's probably best for you to link to me when you do that, but it's not required.
8. I don't get paid; I'm a little guy. But if I were paid by anyone for writing anything here, it will be obvious.
9. I try to do the right thing and if you're unhappy about my blog, or about other frassle content, you can always contact me and I will try honestly to resolve the situation to your and my satisfaction.

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RSS Digest will show or syndicate an Atom or RSS feed on any web page. This is a feature many people want for their blogs. Many more than know of services like RSS Digest.

Incidentally, this is also a feature that frassle offers. Although in the current version of frassle, it's mired within the difficult-to-use publisher.

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Betsy Devine has an inside view of the Nobel Prize ceremonies, in her own unusually endearing style. Perhaps one of the happiest weeks for one of the happiest people I know!

[via Jim Moore]