Posts tagged as: winer

The 12 hour rule for Winer posts, plus a new postscript

Mathew Ingram is absolutely correct, there are two Dave's. My wife is once again advising me to just let it go, plenty of other people will make the right points. The best I can do is observe a 12-hour cooling-off period before posting. Sure enough, good old Uncle Dave emerged to set everything right. You're right Randy, there is no point.

Update: Yes indeed, the good Dave has taken over for a while. Quick Rogers, now is the time to ask him to drop the whole legal issue.

Update: Oops, evil Dave didn't like what I said here, so he changed his (their?) post to remove my name and the link to my post on Grazr. I thought that was not what blogging was all about Dave. I thought going back and modifying posts to erase people was the greatest sin possible in the blogosphere. Oh well, good Dave giveth and evil Dave taketh away. We should time these swings. Maybe they correspond to some natural phenomenon, like sunspots.

Update: My wife is a very smart woman, even if she does have her ... um ... eccentricities. Most of all she is smart about me. She should be, we've been living together for our entire adult lives. When she keeps telling me it isn't worth it, she means for me, not Dave. I don't like the side of me that Dave brings out, so this is my last post on Winer. Yes, I'm retiring the Winer tag. I want to be able to work on OPML and RSS without explaining to people why Dave and I are sniping at each other. I also don't know when he'll take out his anger on someone I'm working with. Gee, I wish I could find more ways to stretch out this touching farewell to the subject of Dave Winer, but I can't, so that's it. Yep, this is the last time I will type the words Dave Winer.

The Dave Winer retirement tour

I have a feeling that this isn't the last blog post Dave Winer will write about retiring from blogging, but it may be the best one, because it is so free of paranoia. It seems as if Dave is always writing about himself, but actually he is usually writing about what other people think about him. This post is truly about him, and what he wants out of life. It would be easy to deliberately mischaracterize this post by saying that he is claiming to be the sole inventor of all the changes he describes. What is true is that he deserves more credit for these changes than any other individual or company. He is the thread that runs through blogging, interop between software through file standards and APIs, and of course syndication of web content through RSS and OPML.

Dave and I started out together at the beginning of the Eighties almost completely in synch, and that allowed us to form a strong friendship. But by the mid-Eighties our careers started to swing in opposite directions. I was unemployed when he was cashing in, and I cashed in while he was working for free on the next big thing. I retired from software just as Dave's ideas about software were taking over the industry. Now I've started blogging just as he is stopping.

People who only know me from this blog sometimes ask what I have against Dave. I don't wish him any harm, but I do believe that he'd be much better off if he wasn't in such a toxic relationship with so much of the computer industry, as his recent posts reveal. My wife is still one of his close friends, and she is always telling me to just ignore him and not say anything. That isn't possible, since he is in the middle of so many things I am trying to work with. If I was deeply involved with Apple products, I couldn't ignore Steve Jobs either. I do sincerely wish that he was happier, which is why I think this retirement, which will certainly be temporary, is a great idea. No, not so he gets out of my way, but so he can come back healthier and maybe with some understanding of how to interact without such a strong line between friends and enemies.

I have no idea what Dave wants to do next, but my advice is to go to grad school and immerse himself in something completely different from software. It is the best way to clear your head, and it gives you the chance to refashion yourself when you reenter the industry. So, if you want to go someplace where people won't care at all about what you've done or what you think about software Dave, I recommend Harvard. You'll deal with brilliant professors who will completely dismiss your achievements and only care about what you have to say in their class about their ideas. It is both immensely frustrating and completely liberating. You will be a different person afterwards. Maybe we can get in synch again when this cycle is over. I would welcome that.

RSS Advisory board finds a new way to extend RSS

You have to give Rogers Cadenhead credit. After enduring several weeks of blistering attacks by Dave Winer over attempts to create a new version of RSS 2.0, he is once again trying to improve RSS. This time, Rogers and his fellow members of the RSS Advisory Board are proposing a new RSS namespace called XRSS. He evidently came to the same decision as I did with OPML. If the only way Dave will allow RSS or OPML to be extended is by the use of a new namespace, then that is what has to be done.

The funny thing is that I just tried to write an explanation of the difference between using a namespace and changing the core format, and I can't find a way to do it that shows why one is better than another. In the end, an application that uses these extensions still has to know what to do with them. The only benefit seems to be that a namespace gives the application permission to ignore the new tag. I can hear the crickets chirping right now. This is not a subject that will hold an audience. I'm going to start working with namespaces in OPML, and perhaps then I'll find a way of explaning them that won't make normal humans run screaming out of the room.

Is OPML 2.0 ready to be announced?

Yesterday Dave Winer teased an announcement due today for a 2.0 of something. He did it again today on the comments for a Flickr photo of Marc Canter (WTF?). David Sifry of Technorati replied on the same comment thread "Hmmm, OPML 2.0? :-)"

Update: The announcement of OPML 2.0 is now up on Dave's site.

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.

Edgeio, Tech Memeorandum and buzz management

Mathew Ingram makes an interesting connection between the current FON fuss and the launch of Edgeio, a company led by uber-techblogger Mike Arrington. It isn't a conflict of interest or lack of disclosure on Mike's part, he has been completely upfront about his connection to Edgeio. It is more a matter of Mike's ability to control the buzz, because of his prominent position in the tech blogosphere. As a devoted observer of Tech Memeorandum, I can assure you that if Mike, or one of his pals, like Dave Winer post on Edgeio, it is almost guaranteed to move to a high position on TM. This in turn attracts additional bloggers who are both eager to pile onto a TM story with good placement and to solidify their friendship with Mike. One reaction to this is probably a theme that has appeared in reaction to the FON story, which is that these aren't journalists, so who cares? Well, how about companies that are trying to compete with Edgeio, and don't have the backing of such powerful bloggers? This goes beyond the issue of a-listers acting as if they are still in high school, it is about serious money and people's professional careers. Again, I'm not accusing Mike or Dave of any wrongdoing. Both of them made their financial interest completely clear, and Dave is supporting a friend, which is even more important to him than the money. I'm sure glad, however, that I'm not trying to form a company to compete with them, because they have a powerful control over the buzz. This may be like complaining about the weather, but hey, I've been a Bostonian for over 25 years, and that is something we do all the time.

I finally grok OPML reading lists

The best way for me to understand a new software technology is to start writing code that supports it. I finally did that with OPML reading lists, and as Marc Canter would say, it is coolio! You can find all the details on my mashup blog. The short version of the story is that an OPML file based on all of the blogs cited on Tech Memeorandum is generated every hour and placed here where you can grab it and use it as a reading list. I poke fun at Dave Winer from time to time, but I can see that OPML reading lists really do take RSS to the next level. Good work Dave, and this time I'm around to see that your role doesn't get erased from history.

Time to start working with OPML

Anyone reading Scripting News can see that Dave has been working overtime lately to generate momentum behind reading lists and OPML. I've been holding back until the conventions solidify around something closer to a standard, but Anne Zelenka's description of her OPML project makes me realize that the train is leaving the station. Time to get aboard everyone.

Geek dinner will have to wait until February

I knew that my first geek dinner would probably be small, but so far I only have one solid RSVP, so it makes sense to push it back to next month. I think I'll adopt Dave Winer's suggestion, and get a few friends together and then see if anyone wants to join us.

Is Dave becoming a statesman?

I took a gratuitous shot at Dave in my last post, at least partly to see how he would respond. To my amazement he was gracious and offered some good advice on starting geek dinners in the Boston area. He even made a self-deprecating joke. Now I feel guilty. Could he be mellowing? Keep it up Dave and maybe we can have lunch at Bartleys again someday.

New subscription icon

I've adopted the new subscription icon () available from Feed Icons for my RSS feed. Getting rid of RSS and XML icons would be a big advance. Other than Dave's obsessive need to preserve his legacy, I can't see who benefits from pushing the internal format's name in people's faces. "Sell the solution, not the technology" should be the guiding principle. When people change their pages to use this new icon they should also drop the 4 or 5 links for the different RSS and Atom formats. Why is that necessary? I've yet to try an aggregator that doesn't support the common variants.

The world already is an outline, man

To be honest, Dave didn't actually mention OPML in his list of future goals. He dreamed about a "world outline." This is something he has written about often. It is a much grander vision than OPML and will require greater changes by users. The key is the concept of "including" an outline at any point from a different server. This would be an alternative, or at least a structural framework for the World Wide Web. I have to experiment with the existing tools, and try to build some of my own to know more, but the World Outline does have two things going for it: it is viral by nature, and it leaves a skeletonized framework behind of people's actions. It is as much a virtual building material as HTML and hyperlinks. If you give people hammers they see everything as nails. Dave keeps trying to give people outline processors.

It always comes back to outlines

The last time I wrote publicly about a product by Dave Winer it was also used for outlining. That was in the mid-1980s and the product was called Ready. It was a really sweet outliner that was able to run memory resident. This was before Windows, so being able to run in memory along with other apps was a cool thing. Anyway, Dave and I both thought Ready had a chance to be a breakthrough product. I decided to help out and wrote the user's manual that Dave's company, Living Videotext, shipped with Ready. I later wrote a book about Framework, a great integrated product from Ashton-Tate that was built around outlines. Neither product was a success. Dave did make lots of money not long after, but it was with a later product called More, which was about presentation more than outlines.

So I approach the study of OPML with some trepidation. I really like outlines, and we know how Dave feels about outlines. But how much of the public cares about outlines? My guess, less than 20%, maybe 15%. Luckily for OPML that doesn't matter. I'll be shocked if vast numbers of users decide to "outline" as a verb, but they will surely consume masses of data in an "outline" as a noun.

The problem with XML is that it is so flexible it will allow an infinite number of structures. We just need a few. We already have RSS, which describes a list of data items. These items can be blog posts in WordPress or news items on CNN and Google. Because OPML already has the majority of outline fanatics on the Internet involved, and because Dave REALLY wants the XML outline standard to be derived from his work, I can safely say that OPML will be a major outline standard in the future.

But OPML won't be the only outline standard. In fact, there is a guaranteed product position as the outline markup standard that isn't OPML. Not because OPML isn't good enough (I have no idea yet), but there will always be room for at least one well respected alternative to any standard.

Evaluating Dave's next goals

So I asked Dave Winer what he wanted to do next, realizing that I would most likely have to adopt the same thing. That sounds absurd, but for good or bad it is largely true. Dave has adopted a strategy of setting clear goals and then coding, nagging, insulting, and herding everyone else into just doing it the way he wants. In the end people accept his standard or some extended version of it, because his is one that has enough backers to become defacto. That is his strategy: nag until defacto, move on. He knows it works, and increasingly others know it works. I was talking to a big Web 2.0 guy at the SSA conference last week, and he convinced me that OPML was worth using, if only because it got everyone one step closer. Dave has now listed his future obsessions. I'm going to think about them and reply over the coming week.

Dave Winer has the best week ever

Ever since I became aware of the Web 2.0 meme I've been telling people that Dave Winer was one of the pivotal forces behind this new wave, maybe the central force. Everyone would have to admit that with GoogleBase turning out to be the world's biggest RSS database, and Ray Ozzie announcing Microsoft's synchronization and replication protocol based on RSS, Dave Winer is having the best week ever! Ozzie's announcement letter can only be described as effusive in his praise of Winer's role:

Microsoft and Google are being maneuvered into a massive game of chicken. I'll show everyone my Office data if you'll show your search data, and Dave is instigating it. My question is what comes next Dave? What are you working on for the wave after this, because I think this one is going to be pretty condensed.

Lest anyone reading this get the wrong idea, I should also make it clear that Dave and I haven't spoken in a couple of years and I'm hardly a sycophant, but that doesn't diminish my estimate of his influence on where the computer industry is headed. For right or wrong, we're riding the RSS train now.

I agree with Dave Winer about the Google API

Dave has put forth the proposal that the Google search API be made a common standard, and more importantly that Microsoft implement it without limits.. I couldn't agree more. I haven't written about the Google API yet, but in the past when I read over Google's API terms of use they made my blood boil with their massive arrogance. Here's the part of their FAQ that really gets to me:

In other words if you want to build a business on this API, you can just take a flying leap.

It would serve Google right if their API became a standard, and others allowed it to actually be used by everyone to make money, not just Google.