Round-up

-HP has developers blogs (joining Sun, Microsoft, Apple, etc) (moonwatcher)

-Apple has a weblog for students (Rubel)

-Search Engine News article -- why your business should blog

--"I was surprised to find that over 50% of the visitors of this blog access it through a RSS reader. I guess that has something to do with the fact that all feeds for the blog have the full text of the entries, eliminating the need to visit the site, but the number was above what I would expect intuitively."

--Bill French of InfoAge is running a column on RSS

I presently subscribe to about a hundred RSS feeds and my inbox is running at about 20 to 40 messages on a daily basis; very manageable. I no longer receive email newsletters and I specifically seek out newsletter sources that are RSS-based. To put it bluntly, I have no time to surf the Web; the Web has to come to me.

...As I reflect on my decision to use this less-than-mature model for staying abreast of information, I have come to realise that many of my colleagues and other early adopters of RSS have come to depend on RSS for one very simple reason: they value their time. Many people think that RSS is simply a new model for browsing, and while it is a new way to browse information, it’s far from just that. RSS provides a way for you to save time and depending on how much time you presently spend going to Web sites or hunting down updates to information sources. The more you use the Web, the more time you will likely save if you adopt RSS.

...In 1994, if someone told you that in 10 years there would be just shy of a billion Internet users, more than 100 billion Web pages, and trillions of dollars of commerce based on a globally connected network, you might have thought the person insane. It was difficult to imagine then, as it is difficult to imagine now, that more than 100 billion RSS feeds will emerge in the next six years. It is difficult to imagine a different model of search where information (that you really want) searches for you. It’s difficult to imagine anything as geeky as RSS (i.e., machine-code in a URL) impacting non-technical users in every aspect of information and their daily personal and business lives. But it was difficult to envision a Web page 10 years ago.