Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog

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]?