The Blog Business Summit - What we heard

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Last week, Dean and Robert Scoble spoke at the Blog Business Summit in San Francisco.

For those who couldn't make it, Peter Levinson has a great blow-by-blow of the talk at The Editor's Blog, while Ian Kennedy pulls out some of the highlights and has some interesting insights over on Flashpoint. Infoworld did a nice writeup, as well.

Both during the keynote and talking to everyone afterwards, we heard a few things come up a few times, and they're worth repeating:

  • First, as Peter mentions in his writetup, spam, spyware and security in general are issues high on people's minds. Peter describes out a few measures we've taken to keep the user protected from malicious or sneaky websites. Security and privacy are big issues for us. In the run-up to PDC 2005 (where Amar Gandhi, Group Program Manager of the RSS team will be giving a developer-focused talk on building RSS-enabled applications in Windows Vista), we'll have more to say about the steps we're taking to keep users secure when using RSS.
  • Second, there are a lot of opinions out there about how we're naming the RSS features in IE.That topic is worthy of its own post, so I'll simply say: the feedback is great.
    • On a related topic, it was pointed out at the summit that Amy Gahran of Contentious is the pioneer of the term "webfeeds" (via a contest she set up in April of last year), and I want acknowledge that contribution. It's no doubt due to her efforts that the term permeated enough that we picked up on the term without realizing where it originated.
  • Third, there's excitement around the idea of lists in RSS, but some questions and feedback as well. The feedback we heard has been incorporated into the spec, and a more detailed explanation has been posted.

Thanks again to those who came out to the BBS05, and thanks to the organizers for a great conference.

- Sean

Update: Included links to the updated SLX spec.