Saturday, June 28, 2003

More Echo Support Echo Support. I’ve taken a look at Echo. I even added my first comment, to the escaped HTML discussion. I plan to support Echo in my software. This is conditional of course on the final spec being deployable. But I expect it will be. This isn’t rocket science. I took a look at a bunch of places where decisions have to be made, and realized that these decisions could go either way and we’d still end up with a deployable format. The thing is, I’m still not convinced of the need for Echo. I’ve read pretty much everything I could find on the issue. But that’s just me. I’m often unconvinced of the rightness of an idea, but then it turns out to be a very good idea. Happens all the time. [inessential.com] 8:12:30 PM  comment []     Grant Carpenter: "Who knows, but RSS is locked and dead and encumbered with Mr. Winer and his poor recess skills[1]... any alternative would be better and I think that's why you see people leaping at a chance for a better/different future." Grant says a whole lot. Go read it here. He says some things I strongly disagree with. For instance: "Better and deeper tools will be the direct result of better standards." .... Who is gonna be the Dave Winer (er, evangelist) who forces Google to implement Echo the same way that IBM implements it? Or, who is gonna be the Dave Winer (er, evangelist) who forces Microsoft to implement Echo the same way that Sun does it? Or, who is gonna be the Dave Winer(er, evangelist) who forces Moveable Type to implement Echo the same way that Google does it? RSS has a Dave Winer (er evangelist). Does Echo have a Dave Winer (er, evangelist)? [Robert Scoble: Scobleizer Weblog] 5:05:24 PM  comment []       Dave Winer is angry Dave Winer is angry. Okay, I'm glad I got that out of the way. I am angry that Bray used me in such an awful way to be so wantonly destructive and now that he sees the destruction is trying to scramble as fast as he can into the hills. I've expressed that. Now let's try to move on. .... [Scripting News]   Dave Winer is angry Click to listen to more about: Dave Winer is angry Source: Dave Winer is angry 3:54:03 PM  comment []       Google has added a BlogThis feature Internet News: "Google has added a 'BlogThis' feature in version 2.0 of the toolbar. But because it's exclusive to Blogger users, rival firms are worried Google might use its wild popularity to sideline the competition." [Scripting News] 3:24:08 PM  comment []       Scoble thinks the "Mr. Safe" arguments are really funny I think the "Mr. Safe" arguments are really funny. You gotta read the comments over at Joshua Allen's Mr. Safe interview. Dare says that Echo is about a lot more than RSS. Tim Bray, on the other hand, says it's not. Brad Wilson, in my own comments, says that Echo is about a lot more than "getting-an-RSS-format-that-Dave-Winer-doesn't-control." I don't believe him. Who's right? It doesn't really matter, is the correct answer..... [The Scobleizer Weblog]   Scoble finds Mr. Safe arguments really funny Click to hear:  Why Scoble finds Mr. Safe arguments really funny Listen to why Scoble thinks the Mr. Safe arguments are funny. Source: The Scobleizer Weblog 2:11:47 PM  comment []       No Inventions No Inventions. Tim Bray: We need to crystallize and refine and clarify and write it down so that any literate human can write it and any competent programmmer can implement it and no commercial interests can hijack it. That’s all. My experience with standards bodies exactly matches Tim's.  We should have a small core of approximately seven required elements.  Ones that we know everybody can support.  Not guess, but know. Author.  Link and Id.  Two dates.  And content.  We pretty much are already in the ballpark.  Perhaps title and we have a core. We can still encourage innovation and experimentation - in extensions.  Tim Bray was one of the authors of one such way to do that. We can even standardize some of these extensions. [Sam Ruby] 10:57:56 AM  comment []       Next-gen syndication process rooted in Sam’s Wiki is in danger of going seriously off the rails Tim Bray: "I am worried that the next-gen syndication process rooted in Sam’s Wiki is in danger of going seriously off the rails, because some of the participants have got the idea that it’s about trying to invent new technology or improve RSS." If it weren't so sad it would be funny. Bray's initial post on this subject was a rallying cry for ripping up the pavement and starting over. His dismissal of me as a leader of the community inspired others to incredible personal abuse and cruelty. Now he acts as if he's the injured party. I'll make a prediction. Because of what he did, control of RSS will go to the BigCo's. Bray deserves the credit for that. I think this post is his realization that he's going to get it, fully and squarely on his shoulders. Good luck Tim. You're on your own.  [Scripting News] 10:22:02 AM  comment []       John Robb on RSS and Echo RSS and Echo.  Well the big companies have finally made their move in the weblog world with Sam Ruby being directed by IBM to take control of an emerging syndication standard.  Why now?  Big publishing companies are starting to think about using RSS (really simple syndication) not only to automate the delivery of news to readers but also to automate the production of news.  IBM is very interested in this given their longstanding and extremely lucrative relationship with the WSJ ($500m over the last three years) and other publishers.  It would be against their interest to let a simple syndication standard emerge that didn't require lots of IBM iron and software expertise.  RSS had to die.  How did they pull this off?  Sam was able to play off of a general distrust of Dave Winer to gain support from many of the players in the community.  Say what you want to say about Dave, but he did create a simple standard that has gained wide adoption.  He also kept it out of the hands of the big companies and technology consultants that wanted to take ownership of it over the last couple of years.  Now we have FUD introduced by the big companies that will confuse content owners, delay adoption, and hurt ISVs (by letting the bigs catch up). [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 10:13:37 AM  comment []       Feedback to people working on Echo Feedback to people working on Echo. To non-technical readers, and people who don't follow the daily ins and outs of RSS politics, here's a brief explanation of what's going on. A group of developers, including some very important ones (the developers of Blogger and Movable Type, notably) have decided to develop a format to compete with RSS and an API to compete with the Blogger API and the MetaWeblog API. You may or may not like this idea, if you don't there's not much you can do about it, because it seems to be happening anyway, or something seems to be happening. I think if you're a user of this stuff, you can tune out for a while at least. However, it seems that some of the space on Scripting News will be devoted to this for some time to come. So now a bit of feedback to the people responsible for Echo. 1. Please help me get rid of the personality issues. If I'm going to participate, hatred has to be off-topic, at least in the big places for discussions. When you see someone indulge, and there have been some outrageous examples, it's better if you ask them to stop, than if I have to. 2. Start an Echo weblog. Eat the dogfood. Show us in real-time what an Echo-compliant weblog looks like. 3. It should have an Echo feed, asap. And it should also have an RSS 2.0 feed, so people with aggregators can subscribe to it. This is a pragmatic thing, it's very hard to follow the project now. There are enough people involved to have one or two people serve as chronicler of the project. 4. I think it's wonderful that it's happening on the Web and not on mail lists. But you have to compensate for the fact that there's no single place to go to stay informed by creating one. That's about it for now. Yesterday's endorsement is finished. [Scripting News] 7:38:52 AM  comment []       Dare chimes in on why he's supporting Echo Dare chimes in on why he's supporting Echo. He's the author of RSS Bandit, a nice RSS news aggregator. I'm trying to absorb what's going on with Echo (aka "the-replace-RSS-with-something-that-Dave-Winer-doesn't-control" project). OK, so you're gonna get Winer out of your lives. I'm still not sure how that improves my life. [Robert Scoble: Scobleizer Weblog] 6:46:15 AM  comment []       ((Echo)) ing ((Echo)) ing. The ((Echo)) project is moving along.  Frankly, I find it difficult to keep track of what is going on in the ((Echo)) wiki particularly because contents are being changed all the time without any warning or explanation.  I wish there were pages that showed what people are looking at and where changes are being made.  Sort of like a radar except it shows the activity history for the past 24 hours.  Little footprints and color hints on the map can provide that sort of full-court awareness.  As it is now, wiki is extremely disorientating. In case you are wondering, I proposed "((Echo))" as the project's textual logo so the name will stand out.  My also proposed that the graphical logo match the textual logo and came up with an ((Echo)) hand-sign just for fun as you can see on the right.  Yup, its me with my eyes crossed although it is kind of hard to see.  My wife and I had a great time taking the picture although my son got another evidence of his dad's crazyness. [Don Park's Blog] 6:42:43 AM  comment []

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