By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Microformats in Business — Structuring Content for Search & Collaboration
In my paper Resource Profiles I talked about XML documents made up of XML formats specific to the resource being talked about. This has not been invented and is known to the wider community under the heading of 'microformats'. Examples include the 'rel' tags used in links (especially in Atom), XFN and similar personal metadata (hcards), embedded calendaring markup (hcalendar), and more. This article in an introduction to the concept. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Bill Gates Looks Ahead, Defends Software Security
The Chronicle's interview with Bill Gates is now on available on the free section of the site (it was behind the subscription barrier yesterday). For all that, it's a pretty tepid interview. Gates's view of e-learning seems to be students in class holding tablet computers. Three questions on security (oh yes, everything is fine) were followed by one on open source. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jeff Jarvis: Google Base v. Microformats, BuzzMachine November 19, 2005

Interesting commentary on the newly launched Google Base that says, in essence, "What we need instead is a means of letting you tag and structure your data so it can be found reliably by any search engine no matter where it is on the internet. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Press Release: LAMS announces new version, LMS integrations, services and Moodle Partnership, LAMS November 19, 2005

James Dalziel writes in, "in some ways, this is the most important LAMS announcement of late in that it points people to the actual code they can now use themselves." OK. But what is most interesting about this announcement, it seems to me, is not the new version of LAMS (come on, it's a .01 upgrade) or even the integration of LAMS with Backboard, Moodle and Sakai (with more planned), it is rather the emergence of an explicitly commercial model for the open source software. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Steve Outing: Google Base: Now What Do We Do?, Poynter November 18, 2005

Google Base has launched and is sending a ripple of concern throughout the news industry, as in one fell swoop Google could obsolete their classifieds department. This advice, though, is sound and probably reasonable: "An all-powerful Google probably has the capability to wipe out other classifieds -- but I doubt that's the company's intention". More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Windows Update Greeting Messages Now Include "Avast, Ye Scurvy Dog!"
I don't mind so much using only legal copies of Windows, even though the software is overpriced and the license conditions are silly. But what I mind is Microsoft snooping around my computer. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Yahoo!360 - Home
Yahoo! 360 has opened up to external content, which is good. But does this mean, as Albert Delgado says, that "the 'walled garden' concept is finally and officially dead?" It's a step in the right direction. But I notice all my 'contacts' are people with Yahoo360 accounts - and there doesn't seem to be a way to create as a contact someone's Flickr account or Orkut account. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Bill Gates' Guinea Pigs
So just what is the Gates Foundation doing with schools. This article describes the experience of one school, Mountlake Terrace High School near Seattle, which became five schools. Smaller schools - and that's the core of the rehabilitation program. More...