Open is the new proprietary: The Open Content Alliance opens.

From the NY Times:

“An unusual alliance of corporations, nonprofit groups and universities plans to announce today an ambitious plan to digitize hundreds of thousands of books over the next several years and put them on the Internet, with the full text accessible to anyone. The effort is being led by Yahoo, which appears to be taking direct aim at a similar project announced by its archrival, Google, whose own program to create searchable digital copies of entire collections at leading research libraries has run into a series of challenges since it was announced nine months ago.”

Also: AP Story and Brewster Kahle’s introduction.

(via: PaidContent.org)

RSS feed-finding Google hacklette: A quick way to find a blog’s RSS feed is to Google search the name of the blog and append your search with the words RSS feed. It works with other search engines - usually the second or third result, but with Google, it seems to be more deliberate.

(suggested by Tara Calishain)

What Chris Anderson said: “The most successful business blogs are peer-to-peer: engineers, designers and managers within a company blogging about their own projects for the engineers, designers and other customers outside the company who use those products or care about that project.”

Chris was disagreeing with what Steve Baker’s warning about a backlash from CEOs who blog when they decide that all blogging is like their experience. On this one, I agree with Chris. The most interesting business blogs are from people actually creating and using products, or who care about the projects. CEO-speak makes for boring blogs. Honest, real, human-voice and filter-free writing makes for interesting blogs.

I’ve said before, one CEO who would make a great blogger is Warren Buffett if he maintained a blog with the same style, wit and edge and in the same voice as his annual letter to shareholders.

(Note: While I’m the CEO of a small business (25 employees), I’ve never viewed this as a CEO blog. I’ve always described it as a “personal blog” not a “business blog.”)