I dont believe theres anything wrong with mentioning the recent conversations I had today. One with Mike Munn from Apple and the other with Sean Lyndersay from Microsoft. I didnt plan it that way, it just turned out that way. Anyhow I wanted say the phone conversation with Sean was very interesting in regards to Microsoft's love of RSS. So I had to blog a couple of things.
Simple List Extensions.may not be the only module from Microsoft and although writen with RSS 2.0 its not exclusively for RSS 2.0. Sean's fully aware of rdf:Bag and rdf:Seq and all the beautiful fuctionality of RDF but suggests that the marketplace has spoken when it comes to RSS 1.0. However there parser will support all the extensions/modules which are practical and bring some benefit to the end user including the well known syndication, dublincore, etc modules. I asked about commercial type modules like Yahoo's and now Apple's iTunes Media module and Amazon's Opensource modules. Sean was clear that the same benefits need to be met as with all modules but they need to be very careful about the licences with commercial modules, Microsoft putting out there module under a creative commons licence was mindblowing and Sean suggests thats only the start of things – but also hopes it pushes other commercial modules makers to consider how they licence the modules much more. He actually hopes Microsoft have set the standard and all modules will be very clear about there licencing from now on. xml:lang at the item level was discussed and may make it into the microsoft rss parser as a way to tell language and somewhat directionality. We talked about the smaller language bases which tend to be ignored or at least missed by the mainstream media outlets and how we could foster RSS usage and subscription within these languages with IE7 and World Service content. Interestingly IE7 is coming out in to public beta quicker than I first imagined. However network/bamdwidth usage was discussed and Sean was serious about the huge number of undisclosed users IE7's release could send to
our or anyone else website. Its certain, this is the year when RSS grows up and hits the mainstream
