I have been fascinated by the "format war" going on between Open Document Format (ODF) and Office Open XML (OOXML, Microsoft's XML standard), and I thought it would be a good idea to read all I could on the subject.  Problem is, there are way too many sources of information.  Just in the blogosphere, there is a wide range, from Bob Sutor's (IBM) Striking the Right Chord, If You Can Find It with lots of links and some very good high level thinking to Brian Jones' (Microsoft) Open XML Formats compendium on Office Open XML topics to the more opinionated , but often extremely insightful blogs, such as Rob Weir's (IBM) An Antic Disposition and Andy Updegrove's (Gesmer/Updegrove LLP) ConsortiumInfo.org's Standards Blog, to the specialist blogs, such as Bruce D'Arcus' (Miami University of Ohio) darcusblog which touches many topics but focuses very closely on metadata, annotations and citations, etc. etc. etc.  If you also try to read the specifications and news articles and so on, not to mention dive in and see the actual implementations used by OpenOffice.org (ODF) or MS Office 2007 beta (MIcrosoft's Office Open XML), it might be more than a full time job.  I'm trying to prioritize, but it is pretty hard in this early information gathering phase, and it looks like there will be much more noise before there is quiet.  I am starting to understand why riding the wave is sometimes harder than following the wave, but also less fun.  Surf's up, folks!

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Tags: ODF OpenXML