Dave wrote a rant about users over on Scripting News. I'm inclined to agree that many times, peoples' expectations about software get blown out of proportion, but I don't think UserLand is entirely without blame, either. I don't think I've yet heard a clear answer to the question "What is Radio 8?" Here's my take; anybody's welcome to disagree with me.
I'm a big fan of boiling something down to its simplest possible form and explaining from there. It seems like the folks over at UL are doing the opposite: starting at all the bells and whistles, and ending at the basic element. Here's my take on it.
Radio Userland is a platform for applications that use resources on the internet, just as Windows and MacOS and Linux etc. are platforms for applications that use resources on a desktop computer. Just as Windows comes with a calculator and a simple word processor and built-in printer support, RU8 comes with a news aggregator and a complex editor and a weblog-oriented database and upstreaming. The UserLand crowd is trying to sell Radio with its built-in blogging application, and while it's no doubt a kickass application, and it shows the essense of what RU 8 is capable of, it's not by any means all of what RU8 is.
RU8 is a platform that comes bundled with a killer app. Once I began thinking of it that way, it made a whole lot more sense to me.
12:11:53 AM 
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