If it really is an Indy racing car on a desert island, then I just became its cupholder. Rogers Cadenhead announced today that Simone Carletti and I have been added to the RSS Advisory Board. I’m honored to be joining in company with someone as involved in the RSS spec as Simone.

My own experience with RSS is limited to a (correctly namespaced) hack to enable conversion from one blogging platform to another and a redirection of WordPress’s feed through FeedBurner before they endorsed the FeedSmith plugin. But I have spent quite a few hours working with the related OPML format — and I’ve been dealing with various XML grammars for several years, including two rather involved dialects that I wrote for one of my customers. During that process I’ve learned more about XML namespacing and XSD grammar/types than I ever wanted to know.

I also have prior experience with public specifications, having served on the ANSI Committee for Standard DIBOL back in the early 90′s, helping to produce the 1992 DIBOL standard. So I know all about “shalls” and “mays”. But since the RSS Specification is ostensibly complete, I’m hopeful that most of the work before us will not involve arguments over wording. I’ve been lurking on the rss-public Yahoo group for some time now, and it seems like the discussion usually sticks to salient details rather than nit-picking phraseology.

I don’t have any agendas for doing something to RSS — I just want to be helpful to the board, to authors of products that publish or consume feeds, and ultimately to bloggers and blog readers everywhere.

Thanks to the Board for inviting me.  When does Paris Hilton start?

The nonagility of biotech (Thanks, Assaf). Most people are so afraid of risk that they eschew rewards.

A timeline of blog history from Vaspers the Grate (via Doc, who corrects his own).

And Vaspers pointed me to Rebecca Blood’s essay weblogs, a history and perspective. Especially the perspective. Even though this ancient document was written way back in 2000, Rebecca had me saying “wow” and reading to the end. Subscribed.

Rebecca and every other woman on my blogroll should have made this list ahead of a cartoon character. And I question whether Daryl Hannah or Paris Hilton have ever written a line of code, even if you include HTML in the broad sense of the term. It’s plain to me that CRAVE believes that the store of female geeks is so small that it requires stretching with filler. A quick Google of “girl geek” would have dispelled that notion. For shame. (via Mike Arrington)

AbbreviationZ, the A to Z of Acronyms and Abbreviations on the Net. Via TDavid, who was surprised to find that WTF has 61 uses beyond the presumed definition.

Animated map of the spread of the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl. Sickening. Thanks, Armchair Anarchist.

What’s the difference between Microsoft Windows and a light bulb? You can unscrew the light bulb.