TagCamp

Just up the road from me, there's a little camp-out planned:  TagCamp. I'd really love to go myself and roast some hot dogs, but with the Kidit's a bit difficult.  We'll see.  Hopefully we can at leastsend someone with some hot chocolate and pancakes.

Update: We're sending a posse to TagCamp:

EdwinAoki, SaileshDavuluri, SeanSu - Brainstorming ideas around tag spam, or SPAG.

And, we're helping outwith dinner too.  Wish I could be there... I might manage a dropin at some point.  I hope Edwin or Sailesh or Sean will be eventblogging.

Tags: TagCamp, SPAG.

AOL buys Weblogs Inc.

(Disclaimer:  I know nothing about this deal aside from what's in the news.)

Good coverage here.  The lines between traditional media and blogging are going to continueto blur.   And AOL is getting in on the ground floor.

Google Blog Search

More competition = healthier ecosystem. The question really is, will Google entering this arena increasecompetition or decrease it (by cutting off the air supply of smallercompetitors)?  On the third hand, the Google Blog Searchis pretty basic so far and the real question is whether they'llcontinue to innovate and improve it (Google Maps) or let it mostly sitthere (Google Groups, though that might be changing).

Some of the more relevant / useful links:
Dave Sifry's reaction: Google's entry validates the space.
Bob Wyman welcomes Google Blog Search because it complements PubSub. Though I think I'm a bit fuzzy on exactly what the distinction is.

Threadwatch has some technical details.
Commentary on Technorati vs. Google from WebProNews (Charlene Li's take).

The new Atom is here! The new Atom is here!

The Atom syndication format is pretty much baked; see http://atompub.org/for the version 1.0 spec.  It'll take a while to get an RFC numberand the vanity license plate, but barring typos it's final.

(Next step: Defining the general Atom protocol standard, which willenable interoperable use of Atom for things like blog editors.)

Blog This

With our latest rev of Journals, we've enabled a new Blog Thisfeature.  You need a special "bookmarklet" to take advantage ofit.  Since Journals prevents pages hosted on aol.com from hostingJavascript, I have to give the ugly Javascript code for the link inplain text:

javascript:q=""+(window.getSelection?window.getSelection():document.getSelection?
document.getSelection():document.selection.createRange().text);void(
window.open('http://journals.aol.com/_do/blog_this?js='+escape(document.title)+'&
je='+(q?escape('"'+q+'"'):escape(location.href)),'_top'))

Create a bookmark and copy and paste the Javascript URL above intothe URL box. Then, select it when you're looking at a page youwant to comment on.  It will bring you directly to an Add Entrypage with a default title and text.  (If you select text on theoriginal page first, it will copy that over automatically.)

New beta feaure: Journals panel

Cool new beta feature in AOL Explorer (http://beta.aol.com/projects/aolexplorer/index.html?): The Journals side panel.  I'm posting this from AOL Explorer right now.  Very nice.

This version lets you drag and drop selected text from the page you're viewing in the main browser tab.  Really handy for commenting on things!

Microsoft Embraces RSS

Quick post:  That Microsoft was going to be doing something seriousabout syndication was a foregone conclusion.  That they'reextending RSS 2.0 to support ordered lists (?) isn't the big news,IMHO.  That they're integrating per-user subscription support intotheir forthcoming platform is more significant.  They Get It;syndication is a platform, they have a team dedicated to RSS, and thething that's really important to control is personal subscription data.

(The big question is, how long will we be waiting for Longhorn?)