Gnomedex morning

Related link: http://www.gnomedex.com/

First, new gnomenclature from Chris Pirillo:

scobull, wi-fud (no wireless available - thanks to the large attendence at Gnomedex this morning, we actually had a wi-fud for a little while! but was soon fixed, just in time for the demos to start), googie (any app builder or app itself built on top of google), quackback (facetious trackback), fraudcast (podcast whose owner gets bored after a while and moves on to some other project), arressess (mythical orange beast), canterize (to interrupt enthusiastically), bitchtorrent (the act of automatically dismissing any competing data transmission), slashdork (one who comments just to comment), swuck (useless swag that gets thrown away), firefoxy, rubelicious (the feeling of being a PR hotshot), curryq (an old hair style that you wish you'd never had), technoerrati (feed entry that just keeps showing up...), winerd (one who reads scripting new while brushing their teeth in the morning).

After the vocabulary lesson, Dave Winer kicked things off with a keynote about his new OPML editor. He's releasing this in open source within a month or so, and hopes it will take off as a way to manage lists effectively without having to get into editing XML and RSS, etc. directly. It includes a directory building structure for podcasts as well. Dave talked about how he considers both RSS and OPML and document formats; RSS for news outlines and OPML for lists and hierarchies. Check out this article Dave wrote about the OPML editor recently for more.

Dave also talked about how he sees blogs working at work: that is, narrating your work. He says it has been useful for him and his virtual workspace that he shares with a few employees/developers - he likes that he can keep track of what people are doing via their blogs, and also said that he likes working with people who are enthusiastic about narrating their work regularly and in an organized way, better than those who can't seem to do this.

Dave closed with a ... ahem... slighly off-key version of Yellow Submarine, joined by several audience members. A memorable way to end a keynote.

Dean Hachamovitch from Microsoft then took the stage for the keystone address. He and an associate whose name I didn't catch talked about RSS support in Longhorn. They demoed IE7 and a couple of apps they've built in Longhorn that make use of what they call the "common feed list", which seems to be simply that a user's subscriptions are stored in a common area available to all apps, not just the browser. Finally catching up to Safari and Firefox, IE7 will support RSS directly, including automatically detecting feeds on a page, and displaying a view of an rss feed in the browser. An API for accessing the common feed list will be available in the various Longhorn developer suites, which they demoed with simple applications to pull enclosures into other apps (e.g. ics enclosures into Outlook, and photo enclosures into a custom app for a slideshow).

They also talked about extensions that Microsoft is making to RSS to allow more rich metadata that they're making available through a creative commons license and which they hope will become standard. For example, they demoed an RSS feed with extensions to support lists (that is, a feed that can be both added to and removed from, as well as sorted) and Amazon item data from the Amazon web services feeds.

I had fun hanging in the Cove, which was the overflow room for the conference, with other late-comers to the conference, including Chris' energetic and very friendly mother Judy, who provided running commentary about the conference and her son too. Thanks Judy!

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