During a historic ceremony in Athens, the leaders of 10 countries signed treaties today to join the European Union. [NyTimes]

For most of the world this is probably nothing more than "just another international news". Growing up for the last 32 years a few hundred meters away from a quickly vanishing border (the one with Solvenia, in my case) makes things a little different. Very soon there will be almost no border. Even if each country will maintain its own languages, traditions and identities, we will all belong to the same family. And it's a peaceful process.

For most of my life I've lived within walking distance from a border. First Yugoslavia, then Slovenia. Crossing the border has always been easy, but soon it will be much easier. It's quite a strange feeling.

New RSS features on topicexchange.com. A minor (but very handy) change to the Internet Topic Exchange today: it now supports ENT (spec), which means suitably equipped aggregators will be able to pull topic information straight out of the RSS feeds.

Making this actually useful is a new RSS feed: all posts on the site. If you want to keep track of everything, subscribe to that one (traffic on the Exchange is still not awfully high, so you won't find yourself overwhelmed). An aggregator which understands topics will be able to just pull down this one RSS feed instead of heaps of individual topic channel feeds.

The most interesting bit is yet to come: I've been contacted by Scott Johnston and Greg Gershman, who both seem interested in using Topic Exchange information to do some sort of classification of search results. Sort of like the way Google uses dmoz to give you links to relevant categories when you search. This functionality is yet to come, but the hooks are there in the Topic Exchange, so any developers are welcome to start using them from now on!

For people who are interested in using this, I've written a page to explain how to handle the data. Enjoy!

[Second p0st]

Much better than I hoped. Thanks Phil!