Something big is in the wind for tomorrow's Gnomedex. When Dave Winer is on the same page with Microsoft, you ought to pay close attention (it's about as common as your average totoal eclipse of the sun folks). c|net has a preview of what we might hear from Seattle tomorrow.

"Microsoft is proposing an extension to RSS that would allow it to better support ordered lists of information. Today, RSS feeds are sent and read merely as a stream of messages, with the order being determined according to the time the messages were sent. Microsoft is proposing a way to add ordering information so that an RSS feed could better handle things like an e-commerce site's list of best-selling items or calendar information ordered by the date of an event rather than when the appointment was created.

"Lists are all over the place, and people are starting to move them around via RSS, and they are not the usual kind of data that has been carried by RSS in the past, influential blogging pioneer Dave Winer said in a posting late Wednesday. "The people at Microsoft noticed something that I had seen, only peripherally—that there were applications of RSS that aren't about news. Like Audible's NY Times Best Seller list, or an iTunes music playlist, or lists of Sharepoint documents, or browser bookmarks."

says watch the IE blog and Channel 9 for the news around 10:30 a.m. PST. today (06/24/2005). Better yet, check out Weblogs, Inc.'s latest event blog - blogginggnomedex - for all the news from what is shaping up to be a momentous event.

My boss asked me if I'd read this in a brief chat we had this morning. OpinionJournal is running Peggy Noonan's latest editorial. The subject? MSM (mainstream media) and blogs. This was the topic of a heated discussion while Jason and I were at DEMO and is buzzing all over the blogosphere. Noonan provides a thoughtful and calming voice to the conversation.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis links to a great "harmony" piece by Stephen Baker at BusinessWeek Online.

This is big. Napsterization is reporting that Ask Jeeves will announce early next week that they've acquired and will fold Bloglines into their search offering. There are tremendous efficiencies involved in this acquisition as Mary discusses in her post. Bloglines is one of, if not the most popular of the web-based aggregators and having it's rich database and subscriber base elevates Ask Jeeves into a very strong position compared to its search engine competitors.

Found via Scoble.

Scoble points to a lengthy list of bloggers who weigh in on attorney Martin Schwimmer's decision to ask Bloglines, a popular web-based aggregator to remove his feed. The commentary ranges from the thoughtful to the downright derisive but ultimately opens up an interesting look into the way content is distributed. Those who make the point that Bloglines doesn't do anything differently than just about every other aggregator (web-based or local) hit the nail on the head, regardless of the tone they use to make the point.

"Can we say: There are two kinds of people: Those who Blog, and those who don't?"

in the Friday edition of Dispatches from the New World of Work. It's an interesting anecdote about how younger, web-savvy officers in Iraq are using the web and blogs for real-time strategy-sharing and learning while older officers generally don't get (or use) the net.

CNet is reporting that MSN is preparing to add RSS subscription and aggregation features to their MyMSN portal page. In addition to web site and blog feeds, Microsoft will allow content from their Spaces blogging service to be added so MSN subscribers can keep up-to-date with posts made to friend's Spaces. MSN announced yesterday that he service reached the 1.5 million user mark in a little more than one month since the service was launched.

Scoble points to another browser-based RSS reader - Lektora. Looks nice - kind of like the new RSS reader built into Onfolio 2.0 which I'm about finished testing (at least for the purposes of preparing a review - Onfolio 2.0 looks like a keeper). Like the new version of Onfolio, Lektora is fully integrated into both Internet Explorer and Firefox as a sidebar panel.

The beta is free to try. The release version will require a commercial license at "a competitive price" which sort of begs the question: "Competitive to what?" I'm guessing it'll be in the $30.00 price range to compete with NewsGator and FeedDemon.

Steve Rubel points out on his MicroPersuasion blog today that IceRocket has added an RSS feed builder to their bag of tricks. It's a free service (registration required) and looks pretty simple to use. Fill out the fields, click save, and upload the feed file IceRocket generates to your web server. Create a link on your web site pointing to the feed and you're now an RSS publisher.

BlogJet is a fine offline blog editor that I've written about in the past (and use). The developers have just announced the availability of version 1.2 in beta. Here's a list of what's new:

We are glad to announce the availability of BlogJet 1.2 beta. You can download it from our Download page (click the second link) - http://blogjet.com/download/ .

This version includes long-awaited image resizing, file attachments, extended entries, excerpts and keywords, a brand new code editor with syntax highlighting and better code completion, easier account switching, XML-based drafts, typographic characters and autoreplacement of smilies, full XHTML support. Detailed release notes will be posted shortly.

Also in this new release is a Mozilla-friendly "Blogjet This" extension.

No browser is safe, it appears. Today, internetnews.com reports that Secunia has issued a warning about an exploit in virtually every tabbed browser.

Tabbed browsing, one of the more popular features built into alternative Web browsers, contains a security flaw that puts users at risk of spoofing attacks, research firm Secunia warned on Wednesday.

Secunia released an advisory detailing the flaws, which affect users of Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape, Opera, Camino, Konqueror, Avant Browser and Maxthon (MyIE2).

Sheesh, maybe Scoble has the right idea. Just subscribe to everything in an RSS aggregator and forget about the web (kidding… I'm just kidding).

Newsgator announced a new, free version of its NewsGator Online Services today. From the press release:

New features and functions in the updated Online platform include:

• Folders – you can now manage all your feeds online in the same way you organize information in Microsoft Outlook or other popular email clients.

• Per-Post Rating System – A major milestone, NewsGator has introduced a per-post ratings system. Not only can users rate each post they read, but can also add the rating feature seamlessly to their own blog site. By rating the posts they read, users can enjoy more sophisticated recommendations and highly-rated aggregated content in ways that have never before been possible.

• Recommended Feeds –NewsGator Online now recommends new RSS feeds based on your preferences and ratings. This makes it easier to find information that is useful and bring it to you in a format that is easy to access, read and store.

• My Clippings – This allows you to save all of your favorite posts with one click, and access them later.

• Smart Feed Enhancements – In addition to adding additional content sources for its keyword and URL search feeds, NewsGator is now offering email feeds, which allow users to have email sent to specific addresses converted to RSS feeds and consumed in NewsGator or other tools. This is especially useful for subscribing to mailing lists, or for converting email-based alerts to RSS.

The new free edition also includes subscription synchronization capabilities with NewsGator Outlook Edition.

NewsGator Technologies issued three big announcements today that demonstrate the company that Greg built has a lot of room left to grow.

First, it was announced that Bradbury Software's FeedDemon will now synchronize with NewsGator Online Services (NGOS). Having standalone client support will allow NewsGator to more effectively build the subscriber base for their online service beyond the Outlook community. Remaining somewhat agnostic, Bradbury Software announced a similar partnership with Bloglines as Harold reported a short while ago.

Next, NewsGator announced that Moreover search data will now be included in NewsGator search feeds, another component in NGOS.

Finally, NewsGator announced a co-marketing relationship with Six Apart, the developers of Movable Type and TypePad, focusing on enterprise sales and that new set of plug-ins for NewsGator would be released soon to facilitate posting NewsGator information directly to these popular blogging engines.

It's a big day in the world of RSS.

Brief but interesting. Doc Searls, Chris Locke, and David Weinberger talk about blogging evolution.

This is a great idea. Add calendar events you want to share with friends, family, or co-workers and publish them in a custom RSS feed. Check out RSSCalendar.com for details.

RSSCalendar lets users quickly setup online calendars that can be syndicated as RSS feeds. With RSSCalendar, you will be able to:

    * Share your RSS calendar in real-time with unlimited users
    * Create RSS feeds that show your calendar by day, week, or month
    * Invite individuals or groups to subscribe to your RSS Calendar
    * Create calendar events your subscribers can import into Outlook
    * Bypass problems with firewalls and SPAM filters.

WIRED News has a review of popular RSS aggregators including NewsGator, the Outlook add-in I use. I think the author is a bit off-base in his assessment of NewsGator, FWIW. A lot of what he says cannot be done can and a number of issues he raises are due to the way Outlook works. Greg Reinacker of NewsGator has posted a clarification on his blog.

Despite these points of contention, if you're still thinking about aggregating RSS feeds to your desktop, this may help.

The Web is awash in little orange buttons.

Those buttons take readers to pages filled with XML code for RSS or Atom syndication services. People who don't know about XML or RSS or Atom get a screen full of ugly computer code. But those clued into the secret handshake — or more accurately, the right decoding software — know those buttons are the key to speed-reading the Web.