Technology

And now for some good news from Redmond, so straight from a News.com article here it is:

Reversing a longstanding Microsoft policy, Bill Gates said Tuesday that the company will ship an update to its browser separately from the next version of Windows.

A beta, or test, version of Internet Explorer 7 will debut this summer, Microsoft’s chairman and chief software architect said in a keynote address at the RSA Conference 2005 here.

Let’s hope they jump on the CSS and PNG bandwagon. Maybe even tabbed browsing too, but one can only hope.

Directly from Om Malik’s inside sources, Om discusses Six Apart’s imminent purchase of LiveJournal. In his own words:

The deal is a mix of stock and cash, and could be announced sometime later this month, according to those close to the two companies. If the deal goes through, then Six Apart will become one of the largest weblog companies in the world, with nearly 6.5 million users.

[Read more…] about Six Apart to Buy LiveJournal

Last month I wrote about the Fear of RSS and why companies should learn to embrace the technology. Today, I found a review on Forbes.com of the new Industry Standard website. The worst part of the website according to them is:

The site lets you subscribe to RSS feeds, a complicated, XML-related way of reading news which doesn’t serve much purpose here.

Say what?!?! Clearly Forbes has lost touch with the world of today because in my experience RSS is as simple as putting the url of the site in my newsreader and having it check the feed daily. When it’s updated it reads the new headlines and lets me know. Heck, even if I didn’t have a newsreader or web browser the RSS format lets me read the article just by looking at the code itself.

It’s sad to see a major publication post such opinions which are obviously ill-informed.

This morning Microsoft handed Reuters a press release outlining their new blog service to be released initially in Japan.

It seems there is little difference between this new publishing platform and already existing blog software like Squarespace and Blogger, but M$ wants to get their hands in everything:

“Microsoft just wants to get its fingers into every pie that it can. Today it’s blogging. Tomorrow it’ll be a search engine. Next week it’ll be jacket-powered palmtops or some such crap.”

—Slashdot Comment by Scowling

Microsoft has openly said Google is a competitor, so it makes sense that after Google acquired Blogger, Redmond would fire back with their own service.

Will this impact blogging in a positive way, or will this maybe-too-late entry into an over-saturated market fall by the wayside? Only time will tell.