The Well, venerable “virtual community” (that’s what we had before blogs, you whippersnappers), is for sale. I’ve had an account on the Well for eleven years this month, so this is of some interest to me. Salon has been a great corporate parent (many Salon staffers are longtime Well members), but the ups and downs of their pennystock life make everyone uncomfortable.

Who knows what will happen – perhaps members will chip in and form a co-op. I’ve got, like, $432 in my Paypal account… At least we’re past the bubble years, when some flash-in-the-pan internet company would have bought it, with a wave of press releases followed by an attempt to “monetize the userbase” or something.

The Apple Developer Connection recently posted what looks like a nice introduction to PyObjC. It’s even got QuickTime movies showing how to work with Interface Builder. Cool. The enthusiasm on the page is palpable:

PyObjC’s maturity is unmatched - it’s been around longer than even Apple’s Java bridge (it originated on NeXTstep).

Meanwhile, in case you missed it, the Cocoa-Java bindings are deprecated:

Features added to Cocoa in Mac OS X versions later than 10.4 will not be added to the Cocoa-Java programming interface. Therefore, you should develop Cocoa applications using Objective-C to take advantage of existing and upcoming Cocoa features.

As of Monday, Google News now offers Atom and RSS feeds. If you’ve visited Google News this week you probably have already seen the Atom/RSS links on news pages. To roll your own, just add an “output=rss” or “output=atom” parameter to your request. Goodbye, scrapers.

I have little to add to this but I’m sure glad it’s being said somewhere as visible as The Washington Post:

Either Palm should – finally! – update its Mac software so it talks directly to Address Book and iCal, instead of relying on the obsolete Palm Desktop for contacts and calendar management, or Apple should put some more effort into iSync so it doesn’t have this habit of dropping data on the floor at random times.

If my scanty coverage of the 2005 O’Reilly Open Source Convention wasn’t enough for you, check out these excellent, thorough post-show wrapups from Andy Oram at O’Reilly and Slashdot (though I recommend setting your score threshold to 5 as always, in this case to boil down a “Ruby On Rails Doesn’t Scale” thrash).

The above were my two favorites from O’Reilly’s general OSCON wrapup page; it also includes links to Technorati, Feedster, Bloglines, and Delicious tag searches if you want to read every last bit of prose posted about the convention. Also, you may find some of the presentation files interesting or useful, especially if you’re an attendee with spotty notes.