What I Forgot in Friday’s Feeds Talk
I’ve made it kind of a habit now to write things I forgot to say in my recent talks.
Somehow, I managed to get through a talk about feeds without saying what RSS stands for. Usually someone asks that question when I forget to say it. Either everyone in the room already knew or it wasn’t as important as knowing what OPML stands for (outline processor markup language). Depending on the version of RSS and whom you ask, it stands for RDF Site Summary, Rich Site Summary, Really Simple Syndication, or nothing. What it stands for, of course, is not nearly as important as what it does.
I also meant to add links in my slides to the Wikipedia entries I found recently about feeds.
I didn’t come up with a great opening joke ahead of time, so I didn’t exactly forget it. While we were trying to get my laptop projecting, someone pressed a button that turned the display upside down. I told them not to panic over it because no one ever looks at the screen anyway and I knew the presentation forwards and backwards, but they turned it right-side up again. I was trying to think of how to relate feeds to dancing backwards in high heels–something for which Ginger Rogers is famous and a way of describing database indexing–but I couldn’t think of something witty fast enough. Maybe if the database indexing I’ve been doing for the past few weeks hadn’t eaten my brain, I would have come up with something fabulous to say. Nah.
I remembered to show my props.
