MixedContent

The feisty IE product unit manager Dean Hachamovitch gave us the low down on the latest Longhorn build, IE 7, and how RSS will save the world. Dean talked about some of the limitations of feeds, and how extending RSS to handle lists can solve these issues in certain problem domains. The biggest news came when Microsoft announced that it is releasing its list based extensions to RSS2.0 under a creative commons license. To make it uber official Larry Lessig appeared via video to congratulate Microsoft on embracing the CC license . Microsoft and Creative Commons? Next thing we know there will be peace in the middle east and cats and dogs will be living together. Though I’m not clear if Microsoft’s extensions to RSS will compete or complement OPML.
Dean also talked about a couple of other points:
Longhorn will have a ‘common feed list’, a user level data store of feeds. This makes a lot of sense, and my only concern here is that the data is open and easily accessible. I also like the way Dean downplays the specific activity of Podcasting, instead treating it as the general activity of exchanging ‘feeds of content’.