AbiWord project get funding for ODF improvement (Ryan Paul | Ars Technica)
Evidence of commitment to improved interoperability among the growing ranks of ODF-supporting apps.

Analysis 2009: Application Services come into their own (Curt Cagle | O’Reilly)
Foresees steady growth for ODF-supporting web-based apps through 2009, and an explosion in usage in 2010.

It’s the business processes that are bound to MS Office (Gary Edwards | ZDNet)
The ties that bind - interesting analysis of formats, document conversion and MS-bound business processes.

The Open Document Format Sweeps Across 16 Governments (Trond-Arne Unheim | Trond’s Opening Standard)
The ODF Annual Report 2008 received a lot of attention this past week.

Tech Advice for the New Administration (Walt Hucks | Opportunity Knocks)
Sound advice to the incoming Obama Administration about procuring open-standards based technologies. I expect a flurry of activity in the first 100 days as the Administration seeks to make good on its tech promises, among them making government information available in universally-accessible formats.

On December 16, 2008, the Executive Committee for e-Government of the Brazilian Ministry of Planning released version 4.0 of e-PING, Brazil’s interoperability framework. In this new version, ODF was upgraded from R (Recommended) to A (Adopted) status, meaning ODF’s use is now mandatory in Brazil. This represents another important step in Brazil’s transition from policy adoption to implementation. ePING 4.0 is only available in Portuguese for now, but an English translation is expected in the near future.