Like lots of other netizens, far too much information passes across my virtual desk in a day. With blogs, TechMeme, Twitter, and dozens of other sites and services, there’s far too many things to process all at once. At the same time, I don’t like missing anything. Usually what I do is bookmark things with del.icio.us, and then review them later. Sometimes those links are unrelated, other times they are part of a larger topic or subject. Here are five such topics:
- Silverlight
Microsoft’s platform for Rich Internet Applications. I’ve checked out demos, examples, overviews, and other general information, but I need to get my hands dirty. I need to create something using Silverlight. - F#
Another Microsoft item on this list shouldn’t surprise anyone. F# is a functional and object-oriented programming language. I’ve heard many developers say that you should learn one new programming language a year, and F# seems to be worth looking into. Especially since Visual Studio will have full support for it! - SOCAN
Society of Composers, Artists and Music Publishers of Canada. The link is an Engadget article talking about the SOCAN push for a tax on music downloads here in Canada. I’ve been reading tons about the music industry lately, especially since the Radiohead experiment, but I want to know more about how Canada specifically is affected. - OpenID
A decentralized, single sign-on system that seems be all the rage these days. I’ve actually played with some code on this one, but I need to devote more energy to it. I want to know how it works with other systems, and where the system is going in the future. - APML
Attention Profiling Markup Language. Possibly the geekiest thing on this list. Essentially it’s an XML format for sharing your “attention” or “interests”. It enables you to rank your likes and dislikes, and to share that information with other services and applications. I think it could enable some really interesting scenarios if it was used widely enough.
There are dozens of other things I could have mentioned, of course, but these five are particularly interesting to me.
MasterMaq's Blog 
OpenID is a great idea, but I’m not sure that it will ever take off. It would be nice if it did though. It would certainly help in providing people with control and ownership over their own online identities.
I hear ya, though OpenID has made some big wins lately, so there’s momentum at least!
OpenID is an excellent idea, I use it everywhere that lets me. I plan to use it on my blog as an easy way to authenticate and get rid of spam.
It is very simple, yet very strong. I have an OpenID endpoint set up at openid.chadohman.com, so I don’t need to use a third party endpoint.
If some bigger web companies get into the whole idea, it would really expand and become really useful.
I’ve heard alot about Silverlight, and I must say it might be the only good thing I’ve seen come out of Microsoft since the Xbox. I didn’t know about APML before, but I’ll check it out. It sounds very interesting.