Why I don't grok (XML) namespaces. [Keith's Weblog]

Practical RDF: Sometimes you feel like RDF, sometimes you don't. (SOURCE:"burningb")-Excellent wine example clearly explains the difference between XML, RDF and ontologies and the uses of each!
<quote>
XML gives us the ability to record bits and pieces of data in a valid manner. RDF then builds on the data, piecing the bits and pieces together into complete statements. Ontologies then take these statements and builds machine-understandable inferential rules based around them. The result of all this working together is the wine scenario:
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

The SOAP/XML-RPC/REST Saga, Chap. 51. (SOURCE:"timb")-A lucid, easy to understand explanation of SOAP, XML-RPC and REST. Bravo, Tim!
<quote>
Today Dave Sifry of the excellent Technorati announced an API for the world. The API, as announced, is about as purely Webby a thing as you can imagine. Dave Winer pushed back, suggesting a more SOAP/XML-RPC kind of approach. This is maybe the single central issue in architecting Web apps right at the moment, so I think it's OK to take a few more whacks at the supine equine. Furthermore, I think the issue is simple enough that anyone who uses the web, not just geeks, ought to be able to understand it. So I've provided an introduction for the non-geeks who read ongoing, all three of them, and looked a little more closely at the Technorati situation.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Revisiting the Virtual Press Room.

Phil Wainewright

I've just subscribed to Phil Wainewright's archive of press releases at looselycoupled.com. (PR folk take note: I subscribed voluntarily to this feed.) An analyst and writer focused on Web services, Phil has built an application that publicists can use to post their press releases to his website, which in turn flows them out as an RSS feed. ... [Jon's Radio]

SharpReader is awesome.

Ok, SharpReader is freaking awesome. It supports categories, has multi-threaded updating of feeds, and the entry threading feature is amazing. It tells me when someone else I read refers to the post I'm currently reading. Really fantastic. Even more reason to include entire posts in your RSS feeds. People, you listening??

Hopefully I won't wind up hating SharpReader after using it for a little while like I did with the last RSS reader I tried. One good sign is that pieces of SharpReader have grown on me after using it for a little while. For example, the way it keeps old posts around. It works more like an e-mail client, where you have to explicitly delete old items, rather than having them expire in some way. At first I didn't like this. Syndirella kept a configurable number of old items around (I think it defaulted to 50). NewsDesk only kept items around that were in the current feed. After using it though, I think SharpReader does it the best, because posts simply stay around for as long as you want them to. Seems like the best plan to me, even though you do have to explicitly delete old posts (but there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts to help you delete a lot of old posts at once ).

Ooh, cool. It exports feeds in the OPML file in the same order as they appear in your SharpReader window. Makes sense, right? Now I don't have to sort my OPML file before displaying it. In fact, now I shouldn't!.

[Keith's Weblog]

Since Keith seems so intent on promoting entire posts in RSS, I hope he doesn't mind me posting his entire post. :-)

The semantic blog. I've long dreamed of using RSS to produce and consume XML content. We're so close. RSS content is HTML, which is almost XHTML, a gap that HTML Tidy can close. In current practice, the meat of an RSS item appears in the <description> tag, either as an HTML-escaped (aka entity-encoded) string or as a CDATA element. As has been often observed, it'd be really cool to have the option to use XHTML as well. Then I could write blog items in which the <pre> tag, or perhaps a class="codeFragment" attribute, marks regions for precise search. You or I could aggregate those items into personal XPath-aware databases in order to do those searches locally (perhaps even offline), and public aggregators could offer the same capability over the Web. [O'Reilly Network] ... [Jon's Radio]

I'm not sure how these statistics were compiled, but this article at Curiouser and curiouser! breaks down the top 40 aggregators by mindshare, download size, and number of (users?).  Several popular aggregators appear more than once because they are tracked by version number.

Our friend Syndirella #2 in the mix, but NetNewsWire heads up the pack.  Go figure, a Mac Os X application is the leader by almost double!  Are the majority of bloggers Mac users?