Wow, a whole room full of bloggers. I'm filled with a sudden fear of what would happen if there was an accident that wiped the room out. Imagine blogging silence. My original warm happy glow (as a result of meeting Rory) gradually subsides through the session as I realised what a political and grumpy bunch some bloggers are (Joel agreed). See Randy Holloway for more detailed technical details.
Solving the problem of posting to different engines
Clemens is talking about how he decided to use metablog api that allowed cross-posting between DasBlog and .Text. It uses XML RPC. A fantastic solution from a while ago says Clemens, it's time is over. Many of the blogging engines have custom extensions that make it hard to cross post.
Clemens likes Userland for their spirt but not their technical ignorance. They are stuck with a 1997 view of XML, they ignor the namespaces and ignore the angle brackets. Apparently it was Dave, not the rest of the Userland crew. Clemens believes that Dave is ignorant of the XML advances.
Atom is a community effort that is trying to solve these things (someone asks, 'What's the problem Atom was trying to solve?' 'Dave Winer' someone yells out). Clemens concern is that there is a 'comunity discussion' that may go nowhere. We could either wait or we could define our own standard. DasBlog, .Text are the dominant engines (in the .NET space), SharpReader, RSSBandit and Newsgator are the major readers. Perhaps a 'standard' can be created rather than waiting. Scoble reminds us of Don Box's comment that 'the only spec that matters is a spec that is being used'. The mood is that Clemens and Scott should go away and work it out between themselves.
Robert Scoble 'I'm already getting a bit overloaded now [reading feeds 600 RSS feeds] - I think 1200 is the maximum'. It's reassuring for all of us to know there are limits.
Clemens is asking Scoble how much the Microsoft Marketers might pay for a WinFS RSS application. Scoble: $50.
How did Scoble start blogging?
Scoble said MSN have been asking him why he blogs. He started with FrontPage 97 and had to know a lot about a server and the technology, not could enough for his mum. The problem originally was that no-one would see a blog - he had to add his blog to the search engine. People want to see a visit straight away. Dave used to refresh weblogs.com and view each post as a way of getting the freshest comment. On Saturdays Scoble still does this. On his first post 3.5 years ago he got 15 visits straight away, which fed his ego enough to keep feeding the machine.