Here we go again

"Syndication politics are every bit as twisted as any soap opera you'll see on daytime television. Only without the sex. And with a bunch of bearded fat guys in place of the pretty models. " ( Dave Walker)

As a bearded, person of size, who is involved with RSS, I guess I have a right to chime in here. I first realized that something was up with the RSS Advisory Board when I saw this post from Dave Winer. Then I found John Palfrey's statement backing up Dave. It was clear that another struggle over control of RSS was getting ready to explode. Sure enough, Rogers Cadenhead, Chairman of the advisory board, posted his response a few hours later.

I'm not going to try to unravel the past machinations of Dave versus the RSS community, but I'd like to point out a few things that have changed from past struggles on this issue. When RSS emerged in the late Nineties, it was a simple format that only a few bloggers used to make their personal musings more accessible to their friends. By the time the battle over syndication formats really started to rage, blogging had become an important part of the Internet, but the infrastructure was still in the hands of a few people who did it mostly for love instead of money. Dave was able to maintain control over the RSS specification by sheer force of will, even though RDF and Atom did emerge as competitors.

This time things are different. RSS has now become a critical component of the next wave of software innovation, for which I've given Dave full credit. Unfortunately for Dave, however, "nagging until defacto" won't cut it this time. There is too much money and momentum behind making RSS as useful as possible. We have moved beyond aggregator publishers who just nod and smile when yelled at, because they can't afford to have Dave as an enemy. RSS is now a delivery protocol for many types of information beyond blogs. And the simple fact is that RSS sucks. Anyone who works with it knows that there are huge holes and weaknesses in the spec and the current implementations. Many people, including myself, are ready to put a great deal of time into building tools on top of RSS and its related format OPML, and we care a lot more about improving functionality than we worry about Dave getting mad at us.

So go ahead Rogers and the rest of the RSS Advisory Board. If Dave wants to put his considerable intellect into improving RSS, his suggestions will be given a great deal of respect, but this time around change is coming whether he approves or not.

Update: Sam Ruby: "In the long run, the success of the work currently under the working title of RSS 2.0.2 depends little on what Harvard thinks, but instead depends very much on what people like Nick [Bradbury] and companies like Microsoft actually do."

Update: Steve Gillmor raises the temperature of the debate by declaring Sam Ruby's post pure bullshit.