I’m all about doing whatever it may be that’s the latest “thing to do”. Where I am these days, using XML-RPC to ping Weblogs.com is the thing to do (odd, I know).

So, I’m doing it. Actsofvolition.com now pings weblogs.com whenever it’s updated.

Props to the good people at Userland Software on their work with the XML-RPC protocol. For an Adbusters subscriber, I’ve always been quite sympathetic to Microsoft (I even like Clippy – seriously), the work being done on the SOAP and XML-RPC protocols by Dave Winer and the other folks at Userland may well save us (and Microsoft) from the Microsoft world.

What the hell does this mean? Well, in of itself, not a whole lot. It means that every time one of the geniuses around here makes a post, Weblogs.com will be notified and show our site on their list. Then, other sites can sort-of syndicate that list – for example, they could have a ’10 recently updated sites’ list that would grab its content from the master list at weblogs.com.

This is not a big deal, but it is just the tip of the iceberg. The more important thing is that I called a procedure on another web server and passed information in an understandable format – a simple, but powerful concept. Hopefully this simple experiment will be the begining of some more interesting and useful applications of this technology (more to come as I experiment further with this).

I often complain about the use of acronyms, so I appologize for this post. XML-RPC stands for Extensible Markup Language – Remote Procedure Calling. SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol.