I picked one of these up yesterday…after calling AT&T a few times (I’m an existing customer), I got the impression that it would be a week or so before I had it in my hands. So I called the local Best Buy, and they had a whole box of them – so about a half hour after that, I had one in my hands!

I have to say, this is a pretty cool device. In fact, my only complaint so far is that certain mMode functions (like the location services) don’t work…or, more specifically, they don’t show up on the mMode menu. If you type in the secret URLs, some of them will work, but some of them show errors. I would hope AT&T will get these things worked out soon.

Ok, two more complaints…it runs SmartPhone 2002 (instead of 2003, so only one email box), and no camera. But hey, we can’t have everything all at once! ;-)

Great form factor, though – my first impression is that I think Motorola did a great job with this phone.

Since I was a pressplay subscriber, they switched my account over to the new Napster service beta. For those of you dying to know, it’s almost identical to the old PressPlay, but with a different GUI. The biggest change seems to be the name!

If all three of the below apply to you:

• You work in a small company with 1-10 employees
• You love NewsGator
• You would be willing to talk to the press for a few minutes

Dare Obasanjo on RSS-Data:

I had originally planned to ignore the proposal along with the ensuing interest in the format that sprang up in a few weblogs but after seeing an article about RSS-Data in EWeek which attempts to legitimize what is basically a bad idea I decided to go ahead and post a critique of the proposal.

[…]

The bottom line is that it is hard to see how Jeremy Allaire’s proposal is any better than the status quo and in many ways it is worse.

Dare and I don’t always agree, but in this case I couldn’t have said it any better. The RSS-Data proposal takes the god-awful (IMHO) XML-RPC serialization format, and pushes it into RSS feeds. And at the end of the day, you’re no better off than you are with RSS extensions, except that it’s harder to read, and more difficult to parse.

Les Orchard has also posted (1, 2, 3, 4) about RSS-Data, with some examples.

I don’t get it…if the goal is to get aggregators to understand arbitrary extensions, this doesn’t help. Not at all. The client still needs to know what the information is…changing the serialization format used isn’t relevant to solving that problem. We’ve already seen lots of namespaced RSS extensions, with more coming. This is the right way to extend a XML document – create a namespace, and put your new elements into it. It’s not rocket science.

Go to the NewsGator Feed Search page at http://www.newsgator.com/feeds.aspx, and look at the right side where we list some places to find more feeds.

Now go to http://www.feed-me.info/DesktopDefault.aspx?tabid=32. Look familiar?

Not only is our text being used word-for-word, but two of the images (for Syndic8 and Daypop) are images that we made ourselves (with permission), since there wasn’t anything else available. Too bad they’re not linking to the images on my server – I could have some fun.

Update 10/1/2003 10:00am – it appears the page in question has been removed.

Dave Winer on RSS enclosures:

Chris Lydon has been doing a series of audio interviews on his weblog at Harvard. There are already over 25 interviews, representing 40 separate MP3 files. The archive is nearly 300MB. It’s a perfect application for RSS enclosures. [Scripting News]