Larry Dignan and other IT industry experts, blogging at the intersection of business and technology, deliver daily news and analysis on vital enterprise trends.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.
Andrew Nusca is a writer-editor for ZDNet, contributor to CNET and the editor of SmartPlanet, ZDNet's sister site about innovation. In 2013, his coverage will focus on enterprise startups. He is based in New York.
Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.
Today, the second and last day of the Syndicate Conference in San Francisco, the event kicked off with Doc Searls doing a keynote interview of Sun president and COO Jonathan Schwartz. As an experiment in live blogging, kind of like stuffing IRC into a blog, I'm going to populate this blog entry with nothing but some of Schwartz's more interesting quotes.
At the Syndicate 2005 conference, a few dozen Web companies--including PubSub, Bloglines, Feedster, Meetup, Newsgator, Rojo, Sxip, CommerceNet and Broadband Mechanics--gathered behind a structured blogging initiative, using microformats and other open standards. "We need to make sure that all new formats, such as events, listings, reviews, audio and video blog posts, are compatible with each other.
On Friday, I interviewed salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff in his spacious San Francisco office.
After Doc Searls gave a short keynote about the live Web (different from the static Web) here at the Syndicate Conference, Scott Anderson, HP's Director of Enterprise Brand Communications took the stage to talk about how HP is embracing it (the live Web) to build its brand and strengthen its relationships with the various constituencies it deals with, especially customers.
Already being lampooned as FUD by OASIS general council Andrew Updegrove (OASIS is the the consortium that stewards the OpenDocument Format), Microsoft has posted a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) that it hopes will address any of the confusion around its convenant not to sue (developers who implement its file formats in their software) as well as questions that have arisen as result of the submission of its file formats to Ecma International.
I'm here at the Syndicate Conference in San Francisco. The show was kicked-off with a short keynote by conference chairperson (and blogger-extraordinnaire) Doc Searls.
Via John Battelle's Searchblog, Amazon's Alexa Web search engine is offering its index and a set of Web services--such as search, category browsing and metadata crawling--for building custom search solutions. According to Alexa's site, the index has 4.
Worth reading: Dana Gardner predicts in his recently launched ZDNet blog Briefings Direct that Microsoft will win the AOL sweepstakes, leaving Google to look elsewhere for a big chunk of ad revenue. The stakes if Microsoft wins — no doubt by mere show of loot — are extremely high.
If you've been following my various rantings on this blog, particularly the ones about file formats (OpenDocument Format vs. Microsoft's Office XML-based formats) or digital restrictions management (DRM) [sic], or a lot of what I've written over the last five years about open standards and intellectual property, then you'll know that for the benefit of technology buyers (ZDNet's audience), I'm a strong advocate of open standards.
As 2005 comes to a close, my colleague at CNET Esther Dyson is busy planning PC Forum, her annual March executive conference. The theme for PC Forum 2006 is "Erosion of Power: Users in charge.