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David Recordon, an outspoken young advocate for Open Source and Open Web technologies, is leaving blog software company SixApart to join Facebook.

He confirmed to us that he'll be starting on Monday with the title Senior Open Programs Manager. The move was first reported by Spencer E. Ante this afternoon in BusinessWeek.

Open-source Mozilla-based music player Songbird just announced a slew of new features including the long anticipated ability to get music onto the iPhone. But there's a catch. In the past, Songbird was unable to export to the iPhone, as Apple purposely encrypted the device to keep music files within their proprietary ecosystem. Meanwhile, Songbird has always had the ability to sync with iPods. For this workaround, rather than syncing directly to the iPhone, the player syncs to iTunes and allows for export and import from there. So why open both players rather than just iTunes? It's pretty simple. Cross platform and multi-device compatibility.

According to the Brightkite blog, yesterday evening 3rd party developer Chris Hallgren opened the source code for his Brightkite BlackBerry application (Brightberry). Denver-based Brightkite is best known as the mobile social application that integrates with Facebook and Twitter to let users check in, find friends and discover the history of the places they frequent.

Dimdim announced the fifth major release of their easy, installation-free* and open-source web meeting application today. Dimdim version 5 brings a number of improvements to the platform, including significantly improved screencasting, availability of trusted SSL session security, webinar widgets, synchrolive co-browsing, performance improvements across the board, and new reporting options. Some of these new features are exclusive to the Pro tier. To this end, Dimdim has moved all Pro accounts to a new, more powerful server farm, and is now offering a monthly payment option as well, both "at a fraction of the cost" of the competitors, according to Dimdim Chief Marketing Officer Steve Chazin.

Whenever you buy an airline ticket or book a hotel room these days, chances are that a good part of that transaction will run through Sabre's network. Sabre is one of the world's largest suppliers of technology solutions for the airline and travel industry. What you may not be aware of, however, is that Sabre has made open-source software a cornerstone of its technology strategy. Sabre already relies on a number of open-source projects to handle thousands of transactions every second, and today, Sabre and Progress FUSE announced a new partnership that will make a number of FUSE's open-source offerings a cornerstone of Sabre's technology.

Two year old life-story repository Dandelife seemed to have everything going for it. It launched to praise from some of the biggest tech blogs on the web, it built a wildly loyal user base and its company advisory board was stocked with some of the biggest names in social media. Apparently that hasn't been enough, though. Last night Dandelife founder Kelly Abbott announced that the software will be made open source this year, acknowledging that the company hasn't grown or made money and that he made some important mistakes from the start.

It's an interesting story that other entrepreneurs can learn from and Abbott has done a real service in opening up honestly about what's going on at Dandelife.

Over the weekend, this post on Paul Graham's blog got a lot of attention. The title was "How to Disagree," and it focused on the different types of negative, or disagreeing, blog comments. As Matthew Greensmith of Geek News Central called it, it was "a true geek masterpiece." Paul listed all the different types of disagreements (as related to blog comments) on a hierarchical scale from DH0 (name-calling) to DH6 (refuting the central point). And while the varying levels of disagreement detailed in the post were right on target, the question that came to mind is "what about agreement?" Why is it that positive reactions to blog posts are so much harder to come by? And how can bloggers get more of them?

Chumby Industries, makers of the Wi-Fi video and widget displaying device, the Chumby, have just announced $12.5 million in Series B funding today. The company notes that this new financing is going to be used to "accelerate growth of the company, and expand and broaden the Chumby Network to other screen-based Internet connected devices." How did this little gadget get so popular? And why would you want one? Read on to find out.

Email media management application Xoopit launched in private beta today (invite link below) and announced a $5m venture round from some big backers. Would a good feature set and reputation be enough for you to hand over your Gmail username and password to this application? It's not good enough for me.

Xoopit is aimed at the widespread practice of sharing media like photos, vidoes and PDFs by email. If anyone but the big webmail vendors is going to launch an "inbox 2.0" type product, though, there's going to have to be a better API that lets me access content without giving up my password.

Observing April Fools Day has become a time-honored tradition for many web companies. Much like changing your logo to celebrate holidays, pulling a fast one on your users on April 1st is something that many web services and applications have really taken to heart. But keeping creative year-after-year is tough, and some companies have learned how to consistently deliver. Below, based on past performance, is a list of the top 10 places you can go to get fooled tomorrow.

The founders of the data extraction and API creation service Dapper announced this week that their aim is to leverage Dapper in the service of ad networks and derive a semantic index of pages around the web from that activity. They will launch their ad powering product at Ad:Tech in April. Essentially, it will perform ad funded indexing of the semantic web.

Here's how it will work: Dapper lets users identify and tag particular fields on any page. It then extracts the value in that field and makes it available in XML. As a result of this advertising activity, Dapper believes a substantial quantity of pages around the web could have fields of interest delineated and tagged with relevant terms. Relationships between pages and fields and terms and tags can all be extracted and analyzed from this aggregated activity.