Dave Winer had posted that a bunch of people have four years of blogging under their belt. It made me realize that today I celebrate three years of blogging. While blogging has been great, I think using RSS has been the real kicker for the past three years – even if blogger only produces Atom on this site. It was the answer to “What is XML good for?” and I think the key component that kickstarted the Web. 2.0 engine. I’ve used it in several creative endeavors including Real Simple Presentations. So thanks to Dave.

The popularity of my blog has not changed much in three years. Once in a while another blogger will point to an item. Some close friends like Don, Dick and Murch point to my blog. That is all okay because the purpose of writing the blog was to learn about this new medium/technology and McLuhan’s Laws of Media apply. I think I have it now. What a long strange trip it is.

Who would have thunk that a west coast paper, the Los Angeles Times, would have the best story and headline on Bucknell’s NCAA win over Arkansas? Headline made me laugh and the story was well written. J.A. Adande did his research. “Kevin Bettencourt wants to be a history teacher.” Talks about Charles Lee honoring 11–year-old ball boy who was killed. And he acknowledges that Bucknell is a pretty good basketball team too.

At the moment, they can claim more NCAA tournament victories than Texas, Alabama, Louisiana State, Pittsburgh, UCLA, Kansas, Syracuse and Iowa over the last 12 months.

Also a good story in the New York Times by Thayer Evans on Charles Lee living the American College Dream. Bucknell just started awarding basketball scholarships three years ago. Lee and Bettencourt, the two star seniors, are not scholarship players.

Ten years ago when I starting writing JavaScript programs, very few people took me seriously. Now AJAX is well accepted. There continues to be a debate about Java versus so-called scripting languages like PHP and Ruby. For those IT managers who have been away from coding for too long, this article by Rayan Tomako on lesscode.org should open your eyes. Links to supporting articles too.

“[M]any other extremely talented programmers dismantle all the common hollow arguments for superfluous complexity and replace them with simple methodologies and working code.”

The most significant change to the Internet since HTML is RSS. Dion Hinchclife of ZDNet comments on the Balkanizing of RSS clearly its importance and the potential risks ahead. He talks of the ecosystem of Goggle News, Technorati, Feedburner, blogs, podcasts and others. (BTW, this is exactly what McLuhan meant by The Medium is the Message.) I’ll add almost everything that we consider Web 2.0 is built on the shoulders of RSS.

Apparently some “bigCos” are attempting to put out significant products that might make simple changes that would change things just enough to break RSS and in turn the flurry of Web 2.0 activity. So this is important for innovation. As Dave Winer points out, there is a Roadmap for innovation, so let’s follow it.

Disclosure. I have a variety of interests in RSS. I blogged for a long time. I’ve written free apps like Bletter.com that use RSS. In my day job I’ve written an entire content management system that uses RSS at its foundation an currently produces two feeds for every directory published. My AllSudoku.com site produces an RSS feed. And my current hobby/Web 2.0 project is built around RSS and OPML.

Which leads me to the point that I think anyone interested in this discussion by definition has an interest in RSS. So I am less concerned with Dave Winer’s discussion about conflict of interest than he is. I’m willing to listen some more to others about this. My experience with standards bodies goes back to when I was the FCC observer in the late 70s for the industry group creating the Cable Television Ready standard which I believe was a success. Since then many, many FCC industry standards went horribly wrong, like stereo AM, and they would make interesting case studies.

Interesting discussion in the blogs so far. I’ll see what is going on in the RSS-public mailing list.