My new favorite blog is the Web 2.0 Explorer, written by Richard MacManus over at ZDNet. As many of you know, I’ve been writing with Richard about Web 2.0 Design over at Digital Web, and now he’s writing with the big boys. Congrats, Richard!

Web 2.0 Explorer Feed

Paul Boutin writes a nice, quick overview of Greasemonkey, a Firefox plugin that allows you to run your own, local javascript when viewing a web page: Monkeying With the Web.

Mark Pilgrim has written a book on the subject: Dive Into Greasemonkey.

A few weeks ago I got an interesting call at work: John Fontana of NetworkWorld wanted to ask me a few questions about Ajax for an article he was working on. He had read a piece that I wrote called Using Ajax for Creating Web Applications.

The article he was writing is now online: Battle lines drawn again between browsers. In it Fontana provides an overview of the current browser tension between Firefox and IE.

You’ll find a short quote in the article from me (and thankfully it is one that I still agree with):

“I would say going forward that AJAX is going to have a ton of focus and support behind it,” says Joshua Porter, research consultant and director of Web development for research firm User Interface Engineering. “Because it is built on open standards, it is going to be the next plateau that we reach on the Web, like with HTML.”

On this note, I was listening to a podcast earlier today called The Platform Revolution that included Kevin Lynch of Macromedia. He talks about HTML not being robust enough for most web application needs, and suggests that Flash is becoming the front-end application tool of choice.

I think that developers will soon prove Lynch wrong, as they (WE) value open, de facto standards over proprietary tools.

Alex Barnett writes: How RSS thickened my Long Tail. He wonders if RSS and other Web 2.0 aggregaton technologies can equalize page views over the long term, making the Long Tail a bit shorter.

Digital Web Magazine has published Writing Semantic Markup, Richard MacManus and I’s latest article in the Web 2.0 Design column.

I had the writing duties on this one, and it wasn’t easy. What I tried to do was to use a relatively innocuous definition of “semantic” and expand on it to show how we might be writing markup going forward. I also had to balance the idea that XHTML had semantic elements but wasn’t really fulfilling that purpose, for better or worse.

Let me know what you think.

David Weinberger points to a potentially explosive article in the Financial Times. Here’s an excerpt:

The state of Massachusetts has laid out a plan to switch all its workers away from Microsoft’s Word, Excel and other desktop software applications, delivering what would be one of the most significant setbacks to the software company’s battle against open source software in its home market.

The state said on Wednesday that all electronic documents “created and saved” by state employees would have to be based on open formats, with the switch to start at the beginning of 2007.

Documents created using Microsoft’s Office software are produced in formats that are controlled by the Microsoft, making them inelligible. In a paper laying out its future technology strategy on Wednesday, the state also specified only two document types that could be used in the future – OpenDocument, which is used in open source applications like Open Office, and PDF, a widely used standard for electronic documents.

The switch to open formats like these was needed to ensure that the state could guarantee that citizens could open and read electronic documents in the future, according to the state – something that was not possible using closed formats.

This suggests that at least one state (MA) is considering moving to open formats for all data. This is so Web 2.0, where open data is king and public access is necessary, not just useful, as government agencies are required to offer much of their content to everyone.

If I had never played a drinking game in my life, I would probably view this as insanely childish.

I don’t believe I’ve pointed to this yet. It’s a nice overview of the differences between RSS and Atom.

On XML.com, Micah Dubinko summarizes some interesting conversations surrounding agile development and XML.

I think there is something to the “agile development” idea. It’s kind of like bottoms-up, instead of top-down.

The top-down approach, of course, is the Semantic Web. In particular, the technology RDF. RDF was created for knowledge representation, and if you scroll down a bit on the Semantic Web roadmap you’ll come to a graph that shows you an idea of how that works. You can make assertions about things, using subjects, verbs, and objects.

The problem is that this is over the heads of most people, including myself. I think it is wonderfully interesting, but I couldn’t build a system with it. I wonder if this is the general feeling…for one thing we have no great application showing the value of this. I think we will eventually, but developers often need to see the end-goal before something really catches on.

So, in the meantime we’ll use agile formats that slowly build toward the vision outlined by the Tim Berners-Lee and the Semantic Web folks. We’ll use Relax NG over XML Schema, and RSS over XHTML. How many of you browse nowadays without seeing any XHTML documents, other than the snippets embedded in an RSS file?

If you have even a decent number of feeds you’re tracking, you might notice a few of them being gamed. By gamed I mean feeds that time an entry for some period in the future so it shows up at the top of the feed list. It’s really annoying.

One of the reasons why people do this is legitimate: they have killed off the URL of their feed and they want to let you know about it. This has the desired affect: it annoys me until I switch the URL to the correct one (even though I still get content on the old URL because they still provide the feed). A better way to kill off a feed would be to send along an HTTP 301 response meaning that the feed has permanently moved. Feed readers usually know what to do with a 301.

The other reason is to simply get attention at the expense of others. I’ll update a feed and there will be entries on it that are in the future, and so show up at the top of the list. Not only is this annoying, but it borders on unethical because, well, its lying. I consider people who do this spammers, even if they only push the post out an hour or two into the future. (On some systems, like Bloglines, this won’t be as big a deal, because feeds aren’t shown all together by default)

That said, however, there have been a few cases in which this happened to me, I got angry, and then I realized that it was some sort of compatibility issue between my feed reader and the timestamp on the feed, instead of some hideous plot to game it. This happened to me recently with the Signal vs. Noise feed: for some reason their version of RSS (1.0) doesn’t display right in my feed reader (Shrook). As a result, their posts seem to occur in the future, and it really can’t be more annoying. Here they are trying to post a lot to keep up attention, and here I am seeing their posts even more than they can hope for. I have to unsubscribe to keep my sanity, and resubscribe when they finally move to an RSS 2.0 or an Atom 1.0 feed.

But for those few who do game their feeds, please stop. I hope I speak for others when I say we’ll unsubscribe if you don’t.