Making Connections
Lotus Connections = Blogs, Profiles, Communities, Bookmarks, Activities. This is what I’ve been spending the better part of the last year working on.
Photo credit: Alexander Kluge. Licensed under Creative Commons Non-Commercial+Attribution license.
More here, here, here, and here.
One bit of information that does not seem to have been covered in the announcement today: Lotus Connections may very well be the first large-scale implementation of the Atom Publishing Protocol targeted specifically at the enterprise. Creating and managing activities, bookmarks, blog entries, communities, etc can all be done via APP.
Update: Carol Jones: In technical terms, RSS 2.0 has some serious deficiencies if you want to do anything more than news. That’s why we advocate the use of Atom as a syndication format — it cleans up the bugs of RSS without losing the simplicity. There’s also an important spec called Atom Publishing Protocol (APP), which gives you a REST API to create, read, update and delete any kind of application data. At IBM we’re using Atom and Atom Publishing extensively as a public interface into many applications.”
January 25th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
On Atom vs. RSS … I had heard a really talk by Tim Bray on “Atom as a Case Study” at http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1155.html . It’s a full description of why Atom is a better standard than RSS.
On the other hand, I had reported some issues on “Confirmed: Blogspot feed problem with Microsoft tag” at http://daviding.com/blog/index.php/archive/confirmed-blogspot-feed-problem-with-microsoft-tag/ , which made me sensitive to Atom 0.3 while “Revisiting RSS reader choices” at http://daviding.com/blog/index.php/archive/revisiting-rss-reader-choices/ .
Thus, in the case that I might export OPML and move to another reader, when given the choice between “Atom” and “RSS” in a blog feed, I usually choose RSS. That being said, if I knew that the choices were specifically “Atom 1.0″ versus “RSS 2.0″, based on Tim Bray’s talk, I would choose Atom 1.0 . (There were features like multiple enclosures and non-English languages that make sense to me). Alas, few blogs really say which version of Atom they really support.