At the time, a large company, Netscape, had done deals with major content vendors, Wired, Red Herring, Salon, Motley Fool and several others, to provide a flow of news for their new web app, my.netscape.com.
They didn't have to make this information public, they could have done private deals with each of the content sources. But they didn't. The format was documented publicly and the feeds were available to anyone who wanted to build on them.
At the time, I liked the river format, not the newpaper format that Netscape was using. Because the feeds were out there for anyone to use, I didn't have to do deals with the content companies.
They were open in another important way -- anyone could flow their content through my.netscape.com, not just the big pubs. Suppose they had never heard of you, but you wanted your webzine to be part of their system. Because the format was open, and because their web app was too, anyone could join. This was important because at the time something new was happening -- weblogs, and they could be part of the flow because of this openness. If you had to get approval, maybe only the weblogs that Netscape liked could be part of their system. That would be wrong, imho.
And when Netscape was acquired by AOL at roughly this time, all the work could continue, even though their app was gone, and the people who worked on it had moved on. It truly was a coral reef, and for me as a technologist, there is no higher praise.
Today, Facebook is nowhere near as open as Netscape was in 1999. If I had a different vision for Twitter, I'd more or less have to start from scratch. If Apple doesn't like or understand your app, you can't ship it for the iPhone. And if Google failed, we'd all be up a creek without a paddle. Now you might observe that those companies are alive and Netscape is gone. Maybe you can't be open and keep your franchise going. But what's the point of being alive if you're not free? And we don't know the outcome yet for most of these companies.
Regardless, I think it's important to honor the contribution that Netscape made in laying the foundation for all the great stuff that has happened with RSS and is still to come. Thanks Netscape!
Ten years later, we now know how well RSS worked. And let it serve as a lesson for all who follow. Let others compete with you, encourage it even. It's how you stay sharp and it's how you build markets, not just companies.
The Waking Artist from Jacob Mendel on Vimeo is an adaptation of Franz Kafka's "The Hunger Artist" following the cinematic artist that refuses to sleep.
BY BILLY BITZER. ST LOUIS MISSOURI USA. 2009 MAY 9 (INSIDE CINEMA MINIMA) -- The upgrade to Cinema Minima's Web server has been completed successfully. The posting of new stories will resume shortly. The most-recent stories have been put online. Older archives will be put online over the course of the coming months.
Benefits for readers
Speed and reliability: The publication's Web pages will be delivered rapidly to browsers, all day, every day.
Syndicated (RSS) feeds will be delivered timely to feed readers.
Web pages will accomodate "widescreen" movies in large size.
Benefits for Correspondents
The online newsroom will be available all day, every day, without interruption.
The interface is easier to use than previously.
Changes - revisions - to drafts of stories are saved as separate versions which may be compared and retrieved by their authors as required.
Tags are available to help readers to find stories.
The publication of stories can be scheduled in advance.
Improvements in performance. In the interest of security, no details of the improvements will be offered here. What can be said is that speed, stability, security, and reliability are paramount. Features - such as widgets which hot-link to social-networking sites - will be evaluated in terms of their effects on performance. [For the updates about Cinema Minima's newsroom or its services, please visit Inside Cinema Minima]
Cinema Minima's Web servers are hosted by Slicehost, which is located in St. Louis, Missouri USA. We recommend it.
There is no doubt that Austalia's Wolf & Cub will make you want to dance, with their forthcoming Dot Dash release coming this summer. Remixed by BFAM, the lead single "Seven Sevens" gets even more glossy.
After the success of their debut album, Vessels, Wolf and Cub recorded the new album, Science and Sorcery, with Chris Colonna, who took the bands early demos and helped shape their sound into the dark, dancey mix that is heard on tracks like "Seven Sevens". Alongside the summer release of Science and Sorcery, Wolf & Cub will also be touring in support of their album. The band has already toured with the likes of TV On the Radio, The Killers, Queens of the Stone Age, Wolfmother and Primal Scream, so we are sure that their tour this time around will be just as promising as in the past.
If you look at the 
