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06/17/2004 Meeting Notes

2004/06/17 Meeting notes

These notes are a best effort.

Blog your corrections and commentary.

Attendees:

  • SR: Shimon Rura
  • DW: Dave Winer
  • j: j Baumgart
  • BS: Bob Stepno
  • LW: Lisa Williams
  • JA: Josh Ain
  • MD: Mark David
  • RH: Rick Heller
  • Sun
  • Tak
  • VD: Vernica Downey
  • MD: Madhu Dahiya
  • BI: Bill Ives

    SP: Steve Pomeroy

  • Al
  • BI: Bill Ives –>

There will be no Webcast.

Notes:

  • Dave’s jumping right into the weblogs.com stuff
    • lots of negative media coverage, AP flamed him
    • we were moving servers
    • free hosted sites, which he thought no one was using
    • we tried to make the work, move them to servers monster1 and monster2
      • Dave shows a snapshot of monster2, it’s running very slowly and doesn’t look well
    • “the most demanding users are those that get things for free”
    • people thought he quit the wrong way
    • “most of them are mean, nasty people who get lots of joy out of other people’s pain”
    • “it’s not my problem”
    • he’s got a roadmap and laid out enough clues that a smart, motivated person can find them
    • the blogs are moving to buzzword.com
    • http://www.67.19.21.10:5336/httpLog (restricted access)
    • Roger someone took over the blogs
    • they’ve all been moved and will be redirected, resurrected
    • he’s had about 200 offers for people to buy weblogs.com
      • maybe the publicity wasn’t so bad afterall
    • he hopes everyone got the message that backing up their data is important and that they’re responsible for their own data
    • he said it’s funny how flamers create their own environment
    • he doesn’t think it’ll reflect on his reputation at all
    • Addendum 6/18: Dave wrote a followup to some of the things he talked about at the meeting.
  • Dave’s maternal grandfather was a New York garment district guy
  • new RSS spec for encoding HTML into feeds
    • soliciting feedback
    • RSS advisory board members won’t participate in the discussion to avoid debate
    • LW: why is it a big deal? Is it a religious thing about XML? Is HTML bad?
      • DW: “anyone who says you can’t have HTML in there is living on another planet”
      • LW: “You mean this whole argument was about curly quotes?”
      • DW: No, what it’s really about is that Atom needs a reason to exist and they don’t have one. “They have the same conflicting needs. They think they have a better way of doing it.”
      • DW: Did they need to modify RSS to do it? No.
      • Part of the problem seems to be related to how feeds, especially feeds with faulty HTML, like missing table or bold tags, would appear in an aggregator.
      • DW: We’re going to put out some examples showing how RSS can incorporate Atom elements.
      • DW: “There are some mistakes in RSS.”
      • DW: “What would you guys change?”
        • SR: change the difference between link and guid
          • the guid element and the link element might point to the same thing
          • it gets confusing
        • DW: I got flamed by Mark Pilgrim for documenting how the spec came about; the more important element is guid. Guid has a purpose in the aggregator, a link just passes through.
    • BS: Feedburner should convert Atom feeds from Blogger to RSS
  • RH: What’s an XML namespace?
    • DW: a collection of related elements that has a name
    • SR: doesn’t an XML document have a default name?
    • DW: that’s a whole ‘nuther part of this
  • DW: Let’s do something special since next week (June 24) is my last week, but I’ll leave it up to the group to decide what to do.
    • LW: Let’s go bowling!
    • BS: Can we invite Robert Putnam [author of Bowling Alone]?
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