The Feedmesh after school meeting last night was the big buzz of the evening last night. I had four or five folks come up to me and thank me for coming to the event to give the publishers perspective on the FeedMesh project.

So, what is the FeedMesh?
OK, here is the basic idea: When a blog is updated it pings—sends a signal—to a number of services to let them know that the content has been updated. This method, of the blog pinning the search engine, is much more efficient then the blog search engines check the blog every day, hour, or minute to try and see if there has been an update.

Right now blog software, and bloggers, ping dozens of sites including pingomatic, weblogs.com, blo.gs (now part of yahoo), and the individual services (technorati, feedster, etc). So, Bob from Pubsub suggested that there be a “cloud” which has all the updates in it that the blog search engines can tap into. One service to unite them all, if you will.

This Feedmesh as you can imagine, is just starting to become powerful, and with  great power comes great responsibility—and controversy.

My first question was “who owns and controls this?” I might as well have thrown a grenade in the room. This was a room full of tech people mainly—the people who do the work. The CEOs of Feedster and Technorati were not in the room, for example, but their tech guys were.  That  

Got to Gnomedex late today... heading over to the party now. Was able to attend Pubsub's discussion of the a common feed cloud being used by Technorati, Pubsub, Feedster, etc. Was really interesting to see Google and Yahoo in the same room as Technorati and Feedster discussing, essentially, the foundation of their competition. Sort of like a bunch of NBA and college players sitting down and deciding what the rules to their upcoming game will be.

I'll be heading up to Gnomedex on Thursday afternoon from Los Angeles and staying till Saturday night. I'm speaking on a panel on Saturday afternoon about blogging best practices with Denise Howell and Buzz Bruggeman--two really smart folks. I'm no lawyer, so I'll be giving you the uninformed opinion on the panel. :-)  Should be fun. Adam Curry is giving the closing keynote after our talk so I bet we will still have some audience there.

We'll be doing regular updates here, and linking to all the tags on Technorati, Del.icio.us, and Flickr. If you have any other links to people blogging or tag farms feel free to dump them in the comments below.