Microsoft's new extension to RSS is a pretty big deal. Now normally I would roll my eyes at yet another attempt to smother an open standard, but this time it's actually not so bad.

You know an idea is in the air when many people are coming up with it independently. The idea that I'm taking about is micro-content. We have a lot of different people working on this at the moment, and RSS has shown the way. Even that new database thing by that annoying startup is all about micro-content.

I've been working on some ideas for a micro-content "broker". A piece of the infrastructure that makes it easier to synchronize and exchange micro-content items. Now, I knew that Lotus Notes had some cool synchronization algorithms, and that Ray Ozzie had probably had a hand in bringing a few of them over to Groove. I wanted me some of that action, but it was all tied up in the proprietary code.

So what has Ray gone and done? Only spec'ed out a working version of the synchronization algorithm! Way to go! And it's politically correct and all, using a Creative Commons license. This is gonna be big.