I don’t sleep well on the road so I’m exhausted. I’m going to post a couple of quick thoughts and then hit the sack.

• It was great to see Ward. When he got up to suggest a session topic he got a round of applause.
• I went to the morning session on Business Models for Mashups. Most interesting to me was the number of mashup developers not looking for funding. Either they don’t care much (it’s a hobby) or they think they can succeed w/o the extra cash. Otherwise, the session was lots of questions and not many answers.
• I spent lunch hanging out with Yoz from Ning. Ning is fascinating. Not sure I understand the business model (I think it’s ad-funded, but there aren’t many ads) but it’s definitely something I need to look into further.
• Session after lunch was on gadgets, widgets and modules. Interesting to see the major differences in each of the approaches. Scott Isaacs made some interesting points about the lack of an application model in the browser. But several folks seemed to imply that a web based application hitting a local web server was a good approach to offline apps. Why wouldn’t you just build a smart client app? The productivity of Windows Forms blows AJAX away (for now).
• I wanted to see Lawrence Lessig’s session on Creative Commons, but the room was too crowded. Similar problem to the Business Models for Mashups session, but even more so. I went and read email.
• Last session was about architecture patterns for AJAX applications, hosted by Scott Isaacs. It was more of a presentation than a discussion, but very interesting.
• Evening reception was sponsored by Yahoo! They had a cool ice sculpture and branded drinks – Yahootinis – with litecubes in them. My son Patrick is going to love these.
• I got to meet Sandy Kemsley, who is friends with my friend Chris Church who helped me get into Mashup Camp. I was instructed to buy Sandy a drink or three, but Yahoo! sprung for an open bar, so there was no buying. But we did have an interesting chat about workflow, business process and Office as a platform.

In direct contrast with my last trip to the Bay Area, this one is going well so far. I’m in Mountain View for Mashup Camp. The flight down was actually early and nearly empty – I had my side of the bulkhead row to myself. On the other side of the aisle was Todd Biggs from MSN, who was the one who announced the availability of free tools for building IM bots and MSN Messenger Activities with Conversagent. Long time readers of this blog might remember that I’ve been involved with programming to MSN Messenger in the past, so it was great to spend some time with someone from the product (service?) team.

To top it off, Avis was out of normal cars, so I ended up with a red convertible Mustang. Yes, I can hear your pity coming my way now.

Of course, no trip is all early arrivals and convertibles. As my wife wrote a week ago, ours is the House of Plague. Everyone back home is still sick to some degree. And to top it off, today is Patrick’s birthday. We had his party yesterday morning, so really the celebration was all weekend, but it’s hard enough to be gone much less when my boy is turning three.

So I’ve already sold two of my new t-shirts. Not quite enough to retire on, but it’s a start! 😄

If nothing else, this has helped me realize just how popular Zazzle is. As I type this, my shirts are on page 20 of Zazzle’s most recent shirt list. That’s 304 new shirt designs since yesterday. That’s pretty impressive.

So after my two posts on XSPF and some public discussion in the comments, I took the conversation with Lucas offline in hopes of getting a better understanding about the thought process that went into the spec. Unfortunately, Lucas has reacted as if I called his baby ugly and we got nowhere. Needless to say, I still believe that XSPF is completely redundant because it is nearly semantically identical to RSS.

To demonstrate, here’s a list of every playlist element from the XSPF version 1 spec and how it maps to channel elements from RSS version 2.

• /playlist/title -> /rss/channel/title
• /playlist/creator -> /rss/channel/managingEditor
• /playlist/annotation -> /rss/channel/description
• /playlist/info -> /rss/channel/link
• /playlist/image -> /rss/channel/image
• /playlist/date -> /rss/channel/pubDate
• /playlist/license -> /rss/channel/copyright
• /playlist/location -> create custom element
• /playlist/identifier -> create custom element
• /playlist/attribution -> create custom element
• /playlist/link -> No need in RSS
• /playlist/meta -> No need in RSS
• /playlist/extension -> No need in RSS

That’s a pretty close match. There are a few things we need extensions for to represent in RSS, but nothing major. BTW, from what I can tell, the reason XSPF has link, meta and extension elements is for extensibility purposes. RSS supports an extremely flexible extensibility model already, so there’s no need for the XSPF specific extensibility elements.

Here’s the mapping of track elements in XSPF to item elements in RSS.

• /playlist/trackList/track/location -> /rss/channel/item/enclosure
• /playlist/trackList/track/identifier -> /rss/channel/item/guid
• /playlist/trackList/track/title -> /rss/channel/item/title
• /playlist/trackList/track/creator -> /rss/channel/item/author
• /playlist/trackList/track/annotation -> /rss/channel/item/description
• /playlist/trackList/track/info -> /rss/channel/item/link
• /playlist/trackList/track/image -> create custom element
• /playlist/trackList/track/album -> create custom element
• /playlist/trackList/track/trackNum -> create custom element
• /playlist/trackList/track/duration -> create custom element
• /playlist/trackList/track/link -> No need in RSS
• /playlist/trackList/track/meta -> No need in RSS
• /playlist/trackList/track/extension -> No need in RSS

Again, pretty close match. As you can see, the majority of the XSPF elements have a direct equivalent on the RSS side. Certainly, the most important elements (playlist title, list of tracks, track location) have a direct equivalent. For the remaining XSPF elements that have no RSS equivalent, you could easily extend RSS to support those elements. In fact, you can easily encode the sample playlists from the XSPF spec in RSS without any extensions whatsoever:

<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>My Playlist</title>
    <link>http://devhawk.net/playlists/myplaylist</link>
    <description>Here's my playlist</description>
    <item>
        <enclosure length="..." type="audio/mpeg" url="http://example.com/song_1.mp3"/>
    </item>
    <item>
        <enclosure length="..." type="audio/mpeg" url="http://example.com/song_2.mp3"/>
    </item>
    <item>
        <enclosure length="..." type="audio/mpeg" url=http://example.com/song_3.mp3/>
    </item>
  </channel>
</rss>

So you may be wondering why I’m taken so much time on this topic. Frankly, I don’t really care one way or the other about XPSF. As I wrote in my last post, I’m just trying to understand this space better. The reason this specific example interests me is because it is so obviously a duplication of effort with little discernable upside. And furthermore it’s being touted by Marc Canter who I know is all about open standards. Why is the XSPF open standard better than the RSS open standard? Or Atom for that matter? Atom’s creators explicitly describe Atom’s syndication format as “an XML-based Web content and metadata syndication format”. How is XSPF different from that, other than narrowing the scope down to multimedia content and metadata? What’s the value of the narrow scope specification when the wider scope specification is so widely adopted?

As you might guess, my opinion is that the narrow scope specification has no value. I assume that’s why Lucas responded so negatively. But the root issue doesn’t go away. XSPF and RSS both describe lists of stuff. XSPF is specific to lists of media while RSS is typically used for lists of weblog entries but can be used for lists of anything – including media. What’s a podcast feed but an RSS encoded playlist?

The problem is that by introduced yet another syntax for basically the same semantics, XSPF can’t take advantage of the existing tools and platforms around RSS. And I’m not just talking about the Windows Feed API, I’m talking about every implementation of RSS on every website and in every news reader or podcatcher around. Why wouldn’t you want to ride that wave?

A while ago, I made a sign for my door that reads “Architecture Help 5¢” (in homage to Lucy’s psychiatry stand in Peanuts of course.) I get the occasional comment on it, so I decided to experiment and make a t-shirt out of it. These days, making your own t-shirt is cake with online services such as CafePress, T-Shirt Junky and Zazzle. I like Zazzle’s pricing structure the best – they have a flat fee and pay you a royalty on sales. CafePress has a baseline fee and you can then charge whatever you want on top of that. I didn’t want to be mucking around with pricing, so I went with Zazzle. Also, Zazzle has more choices and options for t-shirts than CafePress did.

My Zazzle gallery is named DevHawk Designs. So far, I have two products – the Architecture Help 5¢ shirt in black and in white, though Zazzle allows you to customize the shirt so you can get it on pink or navy blue if you really want it. I made it with Expression Graphic Designer, though it’s such a simple design I’m sure I didn’t really exercise its capabilities at all.

Other than me, I’m not sure who’s going to buy one of these. Believe me, I have no vision of being the next ThinkGeek. But let me know what you think, good or bad.