Tag: opensource

I don’t know why it’s taken me this long to read Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. One of the more interesting non-fiction things I’ve read in a while.

A complete list of open source help desk software packages. This is cool. Now, how can I find the time to test and play with all of them…

Smoke Signals. A manifesto for making the next one billion seconds about distributed, open, and secure software platforms. We should no longer surrender our most vital personal details to a closed-source system. It’s your social data, own it.

RSS keeps me alive and kickin’

Dave Winer has been on a serious win streak for the last few days. On the 4th he defined what an open web means to him. If your web has silos then it isn’t really your web is it?

Then he talked about “A tool whose only output is a set of RSS feeds.” Which sounds like a lovely loosely coupled network. That’s a tool I’d want to use and experiment with.

Finally he weaves RSS, iPads, WYSIWYG editors, and a river of news into a tale of why first impressions are sometimes the most honest but are many times blatantly wrong.

It’s all as Seth Godin says,

RSS is quiet and fast and professional and largely hype-free. Perhaps that’s why it’s not the flavor of the day.

Flavor of the day or not it’s how I consume the vast majority of my news and it alone has radically transformed my consumption of information and acquisition of knowledge. So thank you Dave Winer and all the other developers who have contributed to keeping RSS thriving. 🙂