Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

Ryan Farley blogs about some of the cool features that will be in Community
Server when it comes out.  It sounds like CS will be pretty sweet, I’m
excited to see it when its released.  Baked in FTP server and NNTP
server?!  I like where they are taking blogging software.

Many
people have heard about the master pages that will be available in Whidbey. 
I’ve already developed an internal web site using them, and I must say, they
rock!

Some cool features of master pages:

• You can cascade the master pages, so you have a
  BaseMasterPage, with your basic template, and then you have sub-master pages
  that inherit the layout of the BaseMasterPage, and add any custom
  layout.  This allows you to make change oh so easily.
• Each master page and sub master page gets its
  own code behind. So not only can we have our own BasePage classes like Brendan
  and Raymond have been talking about, but now we can move some of the
  presentation logic into the appropriate master page.
• Full intellisense support in the html view (in
  VS2005).  This is awesome, if you are designing a sub-master page, you
  can reference items from the parent master page in the html view of the page.
  VS2005 has improved their intellisense dramatically over 2003.
• You can change what master page you are using
  programmatically, and you can specify a different master page for different
  browsers, which is auto-detected by asp.net.

The funny thing is, is that this behavior can be
mimicked right now using UserControls.  Paul Wilson has
a post about how to implement this, its a great
read.

Dare Obasanjo
criticizes Dave Winer’s idea to centralize the “One-Click” subscription
buttons that many aggregators have, like Bloglines and Yahoo.  Dave
Winer suggests that the leading players here, Bloglines, Yahoo, Google,
and Microsoft, as well as large news agencies like CNN, NY Times, etc. all
get together and implement a system where you click on a generic button to
subscrive to a feed, and then a request goes out to the central server where
your OPML file is located, and it gets updated, this way, any aggregator you use
has access to your OPML file and your subscriptions will get updated regardless
of the aggregator you happen to use.

This problem screams “PRIVACY ISSUES!!”. 
Imagine how much companies would pay to get at the list of blogs you subscribe
to, in order to give you targeted ads and such.  I’m a religious Bloglines
user, and Bloglines already ananlyzes your feeds in order to suggest other feeds
you might like, and they do a pretty good job of suggesting good feeds, so I
would think that marketing companies could come up with some good ideas based on
your subscriptions.

The smaller issue, to me, is that like Dare says, it
removes the free enterprise from the equation.

The second problem I have with this is that it
aims to stifle an expression of competition in the market place. If the Yahoo!
aggregator becomes popular enough that every website puts a button for it
beside a link to their RSS feed then they deserve kudos for spreading
their reach since it is unlikely that this would happen without some value
being provided by their service. I don’t think Yahoo! should be attacked for
their success nor should their success be termed some sort of ‘problem’ for
the RSS world to fix.

Very well put, IMHO