I don’t know how I missed this before, but Tim Bray blogged about not inventing XML languages over a month ago. This comment is right on the money: “The value of a markup language is proportional approximately to the square of the number of different software implementations that can process it.” Conceptually, I agree with him – my primary argument against XSPF is that it has the same basic semantics as RSS, but RSS is much more widely used. But his list of the “big five” markup lanugages seems more like the “wannabe five”. How many different siftware implementations process any of the things on his list?

I’m not arguing the technical quality of these lanugages – frankly I’m not that familiar with any of them but Atom. But if you’re arguing the network effect, none of these formats Tim lists qualify. I’m sure he wants them to be popular, but wishing doesn’t make it so.

I was able to catch an earlier flight home last night (which was itself delayed, but still got me home an hour and a half earlier than expected). Combined with the work that piled up while I was gone and I haven’t gotten around to the rest of my thoughts on Mashup Camp. Until now…

• This should have been in the day one update, but we had a great presentation Monday night on the History of Computer Marketing. Very interesting and very entertaining.
• It was good to see Marc Canter.
• There were fewer sessions on Tuesday because a significant amount of time was taken up on “speed geeking”. Supposedly similar to speed dating, but with mashup demos instead of dates. In actuality, it was more like demo anarchy with loud annoying buzzing.
• I spent a significant time with the folks from Bungee Labs (no relation to the makers of Halo). Like Ning, they are a web / mashup development site. However, where Ning appears to be going after the hobbyist, Bungee Labs is going after the enterprise. They had a cool demo of a SalesForce.com & Exchange mashup with maps.
• I was very impressed with WeatherBonk. In particular, the way they overlay the map with radar and fog information. They also make SkiBonk.
• I sat in on the Microformats Specification Work session, but didn’t get much out of it as it was a face-to-face meeting of core microformats folks rather than the “What are Microformats” session that I didn’t make the first day (conflict with Mashup Business Model session)
• There was a session on Firefox futures, but it was lame. You can get more from just reading the Firefox 2 product planning wiki page. Interestingly enough, if you look at their list of features for Firefox 2, only one is of any use to the web developer: In-line Spell Check. Everything else improves the chrome. Their priority one features are: new bookmark and history system, tabbed browsing UI improvements, extension manager enhancements, search engine UI improvements, and an update to the  browser appearance. As I wrote in Browser as VM, we’ve reached an inertia point where it’s hard for a browser vendor to add new proprietary capabilities that only work on their browser. Same goes for Microsoft – read the IE7 Technology Overview and while there is great work on things like security and the RSS platform, there are no new web developer feature, just bug fixes, better standards support and a native XmlHttpRequest object. I wonder what it’s going to take to get new capabilities added to arguably the most important virtual machine platform in the world.
• Podbop won the mashup contest. Chicago Crime came in second. Frankly, I was much more impressed with Chicago Crime.
• As the winner of the mashup contest, the guy that wrote Podbop got a Sun server. Second prize was a new intel-based Mac. And ten third place finishers got copies of Visual Studio Pro. Given that none of the mashup content entrants were built on Microsoft technology, I’d be interested to know how excited the third place finishers were about getting a copy of VS.
• I met a lot of great people at Mashup Camp (which is the primary reason I went) but above all I really got a lot out of hanging out with the MS folks who were there. We’re such a big company that it’s hard to keep abreast of what’s going on, so this kind of face-to-face time is invaluable.

That’s it, at least until Mashup Camp 2.

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.