News flash: The Atom Publishing Protocol has officially entered last call: the last step on its way to becoming an official Internet standard.
Recently in Atom Category
The Atom Working Group, that I once participated in much more heavily, just recently published the Atom Publishing Protocol Specification draft 12. This may very well be the draft that goes to "last call" which would officially start the process within the IETF to commit the specification as a standard.
Earlier this week I talked about how I have been "experimenting" with podcasting. I wrote a little how to on the subject and introduced people to the Professional Network Podcast I produced a couple of weeks ago. Today I sat down with Anil and Mena to produce our second podcast at Six Apart.
Working at Six Apart I take for granted how connected (or unconnected for that matter) people in the world are. I work in an office which often gives me the feeling that I am living in some William Gibson novel where people are literally plugged into the Internet receiving a constant stream of data via some kind of feed. So when a friend, hell even my wife, stated in alarm recently, “you have a podcast?!” I then caught myself saying, “what? You didn’t know?”
Nope. They didn’t. Whoops.
So there you have it. I produce a podcast now. Or at least I try.
To help those who have no idea what I am talking about, and others who are contemplating creating a podcast of their own, I have assembled a brief technical overview of what is and how to produce your very own podcast.
Continue reading How to make a podcast.
So Bloglines is pushing a "solution" to the problem around RSS and Atom privacy. From TechCrunch:
You can have private pages in places like Flickr and MySpace, but your page’s RSS feed can still be discovered by search engines. That’s what this new standard aims to change. The proposed standard will allow XML/RSS/Atom feed publishers to keep their feeds out of search engines and unavailable for discovery by adding an access:restriction tag to the top of their feeds.
I fear that Bloglines and Search companies may be missing the point here. The problem in my mind has nothing to do with what feeds and/or entries companies have permission to index. The problem has to do with keeping "private" data private.
For users of services like MySpace, LiveJournal and Vox the problem is solved not by handing over the user's private and personal data to a third party and saying "don't index this," it is solved by keeping that data out of the third party's hand in the first place, or at least by giving that third party special permission to access that data. So as to statement:
No formal agreements have been made yet with any other company, but it’s hard to know why they wouldn’t accept the idea with enthusiasm.
Because the solution is necessary but not sufficient. There are a number of reasons why keeping things out of search engines is important, privacy being only one of them. But in the case where privacy is the primary reason, why is that private data in the hands of the search engine in the first place?
