Still going after all these years.
Microsoft Watch published notes on a speech Bill Gates (my überboss) gave to the Microsoft CEO Summit. In the speech, which was webcast externally, he talked about technology empowering individual users, and highlighted weblogs and RSS:
Gates called blogging and the RSS Web content syndication service a “very interesting phenomenon.” He suggested that by using RSS as notification system, customers can “get the information you want when you want it.”
Sounds like a positioning statement to me.
Manila 9.0.1 has been released. While ostensibly a bug fix release, it adds some cool new features that I’m looking forward to playing with.
One feature is particularly cool because I asked for it 
. The new encodedPermalinkURL macro for news item templates enables constructing Technorati Cosmos links like the ones on Boing Boing. Kudos to the UserLand team for being responsive. (Incidentally, asking for new features on one’s blog is less productive than asking for them on the manila-dev mailing list.)
Update: Well, my site now has Cosmos links for every post, but now the query into Technorati seems to return a bunch of garbage. Oh well. One step forward…
LockerGnome: RSS to Outlook. Neat tool, potentially, for bringing RSS data about events, meetings, or what have you into your Outlook calendar where it belongs.
I remember someone doing the reverse case (bringing RSS feeds into iCal) when Apple’s iCal came out. What I wondered at the time was when someone would actually start exposing useful date feeds that people could consume this way. It looks like there’s been a lot of discussion since then, but no killer app. Anyone have a good answer?