My brother just sent me a link to a Reuter's article entitled Microsoft's Gates Touts Blogging as Business Tool. The article quotes Bill Gates where he talks about blogs, how they are distributed and how they can be used as business communication tools. He goes on talking about RSS and how it's getting away from the drawbacks of e-mail and the drawbacks of a Web site.
Now that Blogs and RSS are on Gates's radar, we should see some serious movement from Microsoft in blogspace. Microsoft was late to the Internet revolution, dismissing it initially before adopting it and employing the standard 'embrace, extend and annihilate' strategy. Now that they are focusing on blogs, I wonder what will come next. With Microsoft throwing their support behind RSS and Google backing ATOM, I think we may end up with a standards war.
I've also been following the W3C offer to the Atom community to pursue its standardization effort work in the W3C vs. the IETF. I don't understand the subtlety of W3C vs. IETF and what that means to ATOM in the end, but it does make sense that W3C shepherd ATOM as they have HTML, XHTML, XML and other relevant technologies in their purview.
Update: Just saw another article on the same topic on the Guardian Unlimited. Very interesting read.
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