Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

I love reading orginal sources.  Here,
for those who are interested, is an original post on the podcasting
approach to handling audio and video media on the web.  This is
courtesy of Dave Winer, who wrote it, and Dave’s blog of today, that
linked back to it.  I put it here in the spirit of sharing it with
any entrepreneurs who may want to jump into creating more podcasting
technologies, services, and content..Sometimes it is useful to go back
to origins, find inspiration, and perhaps even find new branches.

You have got t love the BBC (and the web)!  They provide a guide for protest events.., as well as coverage.

Clues in the wind:

Scoble talks about the power of OPML to organize all of one’s posts–blogs, vblog, podcasts, etc., as well as sources..

Winer adds tags to his OPML spec and authoring tool (he calls them something else..)

By now many of you will have seen the announcement for our little RSS fund, as well as discussion and comment across the blogosphere.  Dave Winer,  Red Herring, Design Technica, Silicon Valley Watcher, Search Views, Silicon Beat, Infectious Greed.

Our message in establishing this fund is that we believe that RSS is
the next ecological layer of innovation on the web, and indeed across
the information technology and communication sectors.  RSS, a
compact, flexible standard for syndicating content, has enabled a
proliferation of new technologies and services that vastly extend the
potential for personal expression, personal communication, personal
relationships.  Unleashing personal participation on this
scale has in turn transformed politics, the news media, and
marketing–and new levels of participation are rapidly
transforming the lives of millions of people around the world. To
use examples that some may have missed, more than a million people in
China now have blogs and use them to extend their freedoms and connect
beyond borders.

As funds go–$100 million target with $20 million in the bank at
first close–ours is a modest initiative. Even with our co-investment
partners Ritchie Capital Management and others we certainly don’t
rival Kleiner or Accel. 

So what makes our fund interesting?  We are the first
fund established to discover and support RSS-aware entrepreneurs,
and to promote RSS-based businesses.

We are sticking our neck out with the following
prediction:  RSS, writ large, is the next layer of information
technology.  RSS, writ large, encompasses the RSS standard
(RSS writ small) as well as the community of technologists and
hobbyists and media players and professionals who are innovating with
it, as well as the “institutional services” that are available for
innovators to draw on and script together:  an ever-expanding
array of  blog, pod, and vblog services, aggregators,
notification servers, search engines, and a vast range of service
species yet to be catalogued.  This is a new ecosystem.  New
forms of co-evolution have been unleashed.  The landscape of daily
life is changing fast.

RSS writ small–a minimalist standard that has stayed stable
for some time–has enabled innovation to flourish on top of it. 
The result is a massive network effect supported by bloggers and
mainstream media alike, as well as major web service portals, and the
forthcoming Microsoft Longhorn operating system.  These network
effects are irreversible and significant.  They provide a new
landscape for innovation.

I think that RSS will be the term selected by the community to
describe this overall ecosystem, but of course about that I can’t be
sure.  But some term from the RSS world will be established, in
retrospect, to name this new layer.  This has happened many times
before, with some term–and associated innovation–that seemed narrow
coming to be known as vast and broad.  “The Internet” (aka
Arpanet) was once
a sideshow of computing, and investing in “Internet-based businesses”
would have seemed narrow. Even after the establishmen of the Internet,
the “World Wide Web” was once a small, experimental initiative riding
on top of the net (see history). 
Some set of words or acronyms will come to stand for the new profusion
of innovation we are now experiencing, and RSS seems as good a term as
any.