Looks like MS has announced the big RSS news. The news? RSS integration into Longhorn (the OS) and IE. Apparently, the IE team is now the RSS team - you can see the Channel 9 video (warning - 1 hour long) here.

As usual with these channel 9 videos, the whole interview format just irritates me. I would much, much rather have a screencast showing me the cool stuff instead of an hour of blather that I really don't care about. Yes, it's nice to give the team some recognition. No, I still don't care :)

So what's new? Well, there's a roundup of links here, but the thing people are noticing is another RSS extension that allows for ordering of items. If I recall correctly, this was discussed on the Atom list, but I don't think they ever resolved it. About the time of the umpteenth "angels on the head of a pin" discussion, I tuned out. Anyhow - here's the Simple List Extension spec. I'm going to have to have a look see, and see what I'll have to do to deal with this in BottomFeeder.

In Longhorn, it looks like MS is trying to make RSS-centric development easier on the Windows platform. It looks to me like MS has given this some thought - but with Longhorn scheduled to be released sometime during the next millennium, it may not be that relevant.