Euan is stuck in an airport. And he's quite happy about it :-)

Recently I wrote an article about the Web 2.0 for an Italian newspaper and since then I have been receiving a few "it's nothing but hype" messages. Chris Pirillo nailed it: it's a renaissance. Perfect description.

I do wonder if artists in the 15th centuries were pitching kings and dukes saying "Oh, absolutely Sir, this painting is totally reinassance". Being Italians they probably did. Anyway we did get some good leftovers from the period.

Dave:Apparently I went on a train ride today in Italia with my friend Paolo. I bet we were sitting in the smoking section. Notato fumare!

Actually all trains are smoke free in Italy nowadays. Same for restaurants. You can't smoke anywhere anymore. The really amazing thing is that Italians actually don't smoke. And I quit smoking cigarettes more than one year ago, I still smoke the pipe from time to time but not regularly.

Cristian wrote the post I was thinking about. There have been a few posts in the Italian blogosphere, sparked by an article (in Italian) written by Vittorio Zambardino, a journalist, about aggregators and how they are presenting all posts at the same level while newspaper and regular web sites are presenting news according to their relevance.

Choice of sources is obviously what makes aggregators better today, but this doesn't mean that there could not be an improvement in the way news are presented. I like my "river of news" style of reading but I had to separate sources in different groups to be able to handle them, and I'm reading some groups (mostly bloggers) much more frequently than others. A system which would allow me to mix again these sources but still let me find interesting stuff easily while scrolling very long web pages full of posts and articles would make me happy.

OPML reading lists could be a very important part of this application, knowing who's reading what in our trusted network is one of the keys. Other elements to be weighted in the equation could probably be which links we click, what do our friends write about and, of course, what do we write about on our own blog.

This morning I updated iTunes from the one month old version 5.0 to the brand new 6.0, soon after updating I purchased a few songs on the Music store. Later I copied the new songs to my PowerBook, which is already authorized to play my songs, but as I tried to play them I got an error saying that I needed iTunes 6.0 to play them. Most probably the DRM code was updated and it's not backwards compatible.

It's not a big deal, I was going to upgrade iTunes on the PowerBook anyway, but for the first time I'm not feeling totally comfortable with Apple's DRM.

TV Shows and video are not offered to non US Apple Music Stores yet, but with video support I have just realized that iTunes can be a pretty good solution to handle all my video files. I have a ton of small and large videos downloaded here and there from the web which were simply sitting in a folder on my hard disk. Dropping them on iTunes allows me to create a pretty nice catalog.

The Weblogs.com service has a new home at Verisign. I'm very happy for Dave: it's not only the money, it's also a solid recognition of just one of his many contributions to the web. Congratulations to everybody :-)