Gnomedex update, mid-day Friday
June 24th, 2005 at 2:42 pm by Rakesh
I’m blogging live from Gnomedex at the Pier 66 in downtown Seattle. The main conference room where everything is happening resembles one of my college lecture halls, only bigger and lots more laptops. As Scoble noted, practically everyone at this conference has a laptop. Some have two like the guy sitting next to me, David Luebbert (in his case one Mac and one PC).
There were two presentations this morning — one from Dave Winer, the inventor of RSS, and one from the Microsoft team lead by Dean Hachamovitch. Dave’s presentation focused on OPML, a way to represent hierarchical lists. Dave’s presentation lacked a big picture and context (as evidenced by the audience member who asked Dave, during his Q&A, “What are you presenting??”), but nonetheless OPML sounds compelling for some of the same reasons that RSS is compelling — it’s simple, lightweight, and potentially applicable in representing a lot of different kinds of things.
The Microsoft presentation included the big RSS announcement that’s being written about all over the web. Basically, the announcements went something like this:
- that Longhorn will include platform components to organize RSS feed subscriptions
- IE 7 will include some native RSS capabilities
- Microsoft is creating an extension to the RSS format to handle lists (contrary to Dave Winer’s OPML approach) and the spec for the extension will be published under a creative commons license.
Obviously, RSS is going to be very big in IE7, in Longhorn, and likely in other Microsoft products as we head into the Longhorn timeframe.
Oh, I forgot to mention: at the end of Dave’s keynote, all the conference attendees (myself included — be thankful that you weren’t sitting next to me) joined together to sing “We all live in a yellow submarine.” Yes, it was fun.
