Dave Winer and Doc Searls are talking about a mixup where Doc quotes Winer via a spam blog named Joape. Doc didn’t immediately recognize Dave Winer’s comments which had been “repurposed” (as Dave charitably describes it) on a blog of “unclear provenance” (an equally charitably characterization from Doc).  In a hurry that seems easy enough to do, but it poses a question and a problem to the blogosphere.

Dave is not worried about re-publishing of his ideas – at least in this case – but is simply asking for attribution. But even if the spam blog in question had bothered to provide the proper attribution and links to the original content, the real problem here would remain; how to avoid having legitimate content “re-purposed”...

We’ve been socializing the idea of digital signatures for pings for some time now, and have had to hone our arguments in the face of inevitable and understandable push-back we get in some quarters on this issue.  On the one hand, there’s a clear value proposition to publishers who already have an established, verifiable brand. Signed pings convey the integrity and authority of the publisher with each ping submitted. In cases where a signature can be mapped to an established SSL certificate, already in use by the publisher for ecommerce or cryptographic features on their website, little needs to be done to enable these publishers to assert their ownership over submitted content.

Colleague Billy Sylvester has an interesting idea for RSS feeds and pings – patchcasting. It’s not quite as media-hip as podcasting, but could be a nice new part of the blogosphere on its own.  The idea is to host a “feed portal” where software publishers of all kinds could host feeds chronicling releases of their software.  When a new update ships, an new entry is added, and the appropriate ping is generated and sent out to the ping server.

The updated entry information would be nominally human-readable – version and descriptive information about the release would be useful to interested reader – but for the most part these feeds would best read and consumed by other machines. Users would be able to choose which software packages they want to monitor via patchcasting, and the operating system (eventually?) or a helper software agent would check for updates to the subscribed feeds, and...

SixApart is talking about Comet, their new blogging platform. Given the simplicity of the tools already out there, like TypePad.com and MovableType, also from SixApart, how much easier can Comet make things? Apparently Comet will let you do more, while maintaining ease of use. Digital media management gets a boost, as does "community management" for your blog.