mercredi 10 avril 2002
It's big. Think about it. Userland, in the person of Dave Winer, convinced a big publisher to deliver it's headlines to weblogers around the world. No one could resist such an offer.
But the way it's being advertised in the press release now is quite disapointing (to say the least).
First it seems to imply that NYT content was unavailable to webloggers before. This is not the case. NewsIsFree provides 12 feeds scraped from the NYT's html pages. They have been here for a long time. Userland people, Dave included, have been using them.
Second, it's done in such a way that it's available to users of Userland's product only (more on why that might not be so below). Now, Radio comes with a news aggregator. It gathers headlines from RSS files, designed originaly by Netscape to let sites easily publish their content in a format which is equaly easy to use by other sites and software applications. Userland endorsed that format and did a lot to publicize it and add new features. See Syndic8 for a stunning of how popular RSS has become.
But the NYT feeds are not in RSS. Userland created a way for custom XML based formats to be integrated in it's aggregator. And NYT's feed use a custom format. The links to the actual feeds are not as public as RSS files, they are not advertized by NYT on it's site.
So while Userland has long supported open standards, it has now conceeded to lockin. Why no RSS feeds for NYT? CNET has them!
Obviously, it's for business reasons. Reasons which have nothing to do with weblogs.
I have nothing agains this business relationship. I probably would have done the same. I'm just disapointed by the fact that all announcements make no reference to prior art and doesn't acknowledge the step back, in terms of freedom for the end user. Of course, they don't do that for business reasons ;-)
A note about those XML files: they are actually not that private. You subscribe to NYT feeds in Radio from this page. Then, in Radio. You can see the actual URL of the XML file which being downloaded. It's a rather cryptic url. It might be unique for each user of Radio8.
But there's nothing stopping you from reading that XML file from another program. Nothing technological (until Userland blocks your IP), nothing legal. There is no terms of service, no end user aggreements that forbids from doing so.
For example, I see nothing anywhere which would stop me from doing this kind of thing. It's a PHP script which takes one of those URLs, grabs the content, and spits out standard RSS .91 which the headlines. Use it if you wish, no strings attached, no guaranty that'll last for long. You can have the source of the script if you wish... It's just an experiment.
Anyway, the whole thing is certainly significant. For all the reasons above. But time to move on...
Of course, this is just a press release. Maybe there's more to it than what has been available in Radio for a few weeks. And maybe there's more to it than just a custom XML format. I have not been able to find any legal document describing how those XML file could be used BTW...
It's cool to see a BigPub participate in this. That's new.
But come on, The New York Times headlines have been flowing through weblogs for some time now, a long time before Radio8 was even available. Like, the one-click subscription thing, it's Userland having a tendancy to forget about prior art again. Infuriating at times! They leed the way in so many things...
