Day: July 6, 2003

More Funky Feeds

I swore to myself I was not going to write anything more about the 2003 RSS Wars, but this section from Dave Winer’s RSS 2.0 Political FAQ was too good to pass up,

If we were to go the opposite way, with every source of feeds inventing their own replacements for core RSS 2.0 elements, the cost to enter would become increasingly high, and it becomes more likely that programs will express compatibility in terms of products, not formats. Then you’d have to use one aggregator to read BBC feeds, for example, and another to read SF Chronicle feeds. So “funky” is anti-interop; and “not funky” is pro-interop.

Okay, he has a point. Can you imagine, for instance, if you could only read the RSS feeds of something as important as the New York Times in just a single aggregator? That would really suck, wouldn’t it?

Thank goodness the anti-interop feeling in the RSS community is strong enough to prevent something like that from ever happening.

The Strange Case of China’s Flower Magnate

So whatever happened to Yang Bin, the man listed just a few years ago as the second richest man in China? Yang is actually a Dutch national, but was arrested in China back in November as part of a Chinese crackdown on bribery and other corruption. Yang headed up Euro-Asia Agricultural (Holdings) Co Ltd (a major flower exporter), but was arrested by Chinese authorities just a few days after North Korea had named him to head up a free trade area near the North Korea/China border. He was charged with falsifying financial documents and his trial was to have begun in June. But this Washington Post story about the government shutting down a Beijing newspaper notes that media outlets in China are specifically forbidden from reporting on Yang’s case. I assume that means the world will find out about Yang’s sentence a month or two after the completion of his trial. Sources: China Closes Beijing Newspaper in Media Crackdown. John Pomfert, The Washington Post, June 20, 2003. China to Deal with Yang Bin Case According to Law. Xinhua News Agency, November 29, 2002. China orchid king stands trial. Jonathan Ansfield, Reuters, June 10, 2003.