For the past week or two, the weblogging community has been working on the conceptual elements that make up a well-formed entry for a website (parts that are necessary, and additional elements). Out of this has come the beginning of a new syndication format and editing API.

The reasons for creating a new format have been discussed elsewhere, with many important people are supporting its creation. We’ve got some very smart people working on it full time (a big well done to IBM for seeing the value in this project and letting Sam focus on it), and we have a constantly updated wiki for adding to the project. There are literally hundreds of people contributing to it, some a little, some a lot.

What is missing though is a name, a syntax and some real value. The name and syntax are in the middle of being decided on (nothing great so far, and I can only hope that Shelley‘s suggestion of Pubs is not used). What we really need is added value.

While I can see the wisdom in not inventing anything new, I doubt that a lot of users will. If they have no motivation to use a new format then what makes anyone think that they’ll change. RSS is a widespread format these days and it’ll take more than just being very specific in the specification to actually get people to use it.

Personally, I’ll be setting up a fed as soon as a stable specification is available (I’ve helped mould the project, I might as well use it), but I wonder if others will.

Igby Goes Down starts bleak, gets more depressing as time goes on and yet still manages to end cheerily without seeming forced. The story of a teenage boy born who rebels against the values he is born into: that of the upper classes. While certain parts of the plot are extraneous, it builds a fantastic view of the protagonists world and his (lack of) ambition.

Featuring a fantastic cast (including Kieran Culkin, Bill Pullman, Susan Sarandon, and Ryan Phillippe, among others), great direction and a genuinely interesting script: I would highly recommend this film.

No point in wasting time here, Dumb And Dumberer is just plain dumb (I know, that’s probably been said by a million monkeys at typewriters). The original had a stupid charm about it, a juvenile but functional wit. The sequel prequel is just dumb.

Idiotic, moronic, brainless: totally lacking the humour of the original.

There’s a few discussions going on just now about boycotting the new MSN crawler, MSN bot. There are those who say that we have to stop Microsoft from implementing a reasonable search engine (for those that don’t know, blogs are incredibly powerful tools in influencing search engines, for various reasons that I won’t go into now), and there are those who say that such an effort is futile and childish.

I haven’t picked a side yet, but I’m swayed towards the blocking crowd. After Microsofts recent announcement that it would cease all stand-alone development of IE, web developers are now very much in a locked in situation: we have to continue supporting a browser with terrible standards support and a limited feature set.

Essentially, Microsoft threw its weight behind the browser market, won the war there and then refused to make any progress; screwing a lot of people over.

Now, Microsoft is throwing its weight behind the search market. In typical style for the corporation, we can expect to see their search engine embedded in every program they can squeeze it into. This could be a good thing; integrated search that works could bring a lot of consistency to the search sphere.

Most likely, it’ll be a bad thing. They’ll implement a reasonable search engine, use various tactics to corner the market, lock it up, and then refuse to progress (again). It’s not that hard to imagine, and it would screw a lot of people over (seeing a theme yet?).

I’ve been researching a lot to do with searching recently, and I know there’s a lot of great ideas out there that should be done. Giving the search sphere to Microsoft would cripple those ideas.

You know what, in the process of writing this I have convinced myself what side I’m on.

This is just a quick nod to Dean Allen for his great work on Refer. A new version is out now, and well worth getting if your host doesn’t provide adequate stats.