First, the biggest news of the week came out of Gnomedex, as I expected it would. RSS will be a central feature of Longhorn, and IE 7 will have extensive support for feed subscriptions. To be honest, I figured IE would have a built-in aggregator, but what was revealed was much deeper than that. Longhorn will have a central store for feeds and make those available to any aggregator - so at least now, Microsoft is not in the aggregator business, but that's not to say they won't be eventually. A side effect that's not really being mentioned a whole lot: Microsoft demoed IE 7 for the first time.

Also, Microsoft announced an extension to RSS to support ordered lists. I guess this would be the first time that "Embrace and Extend" is an acceptable practice, huh? Microsoft now embraces RSS, and they've extended it - even updating the spec based on (almost immediate) feedback from the community.

More from Gnomedex. Before the big Microsoft announcement, two things came out of it. First, Newsgator announced they're releasing FeedStation in a beta that will work with Newsgator Online. Feedstation is a podcatcher that previously only worked with FeedDemon. Since they recently bought FeedDemon from Nick Bradbury, it only makes sense that FeedStation will integrate with their offerings. Still, it's one of the first podcatchers I've seen that works with an online aggregator.

One other announcement. Audible will provide secure RSS feeds for people subscribed to periodic content.

The new Technorati site is live, and looks pretty good. One thing that's pretty cool: http://www.technorati.com/search/rosscode.com - hacking the URL is very easy now! This'll do a search for this site.

MSN Local Search was released in beta. Now the "Pizza in Redmond" mystery is solved. It's apparently not available everywhere, but it was available here in Spring Lake, so it seems to be pretty far along in adding locations.

eBay launches a new developer community site. I'm not sure what'll come out of there, but any resource for developers is worth highlighting.

Odeo is launching this week, via invite only. I got my invite, but I haven't explored a whole lot. Odeo is a service for creating and listening to blogs. Interesting that this is the second online aggregator that offers a stand-alone podcatcher, via Syncr. And they both were announced in the same week.

Microsoft's BitTorrent killer? Not exactly. Avalanche is a concept described in a Microsoft whitepaper about how to solve many of the problems that Bittorrent was designed to solve, and a few more.

Microsoft updates it Anti-spyware software. It's not a new beta - it's still beta 1, but they did extend the expiration deadline from July until December.

Project Aardvark was revealed this week. Project Aardvark is the latest software product coming from Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek and author of a very popular blog. Oddly, the people at Project Aardvark are going on  as if it wasn't revealed.

Overall, it was a good week for news. And I'm all caught up on my feeds, so I think I caught the major items!