Adam, Andrew, Rogers, Steve, and many others have already weighed in on this topic. On Friday, Dave Winer resigned from the RSS Advisory Board. As with most milestones in life, this is both a happy and sad occasion. Dave Winer gave us weblogs, RSS for simple web content syndication, several outliners, Scripting News, Frontier, Manila, Radio UserLand, and ... well, you get the picture. Dave is no slacker in the creating and giving departments. Is he perceived as a sweet old teddy bear? No. Is he strong-willed and opinionated? Yes. Does he have a right to be? You bet. Dave was, and still is, a pioneer. Pioneers accumulate arrows in the back. When a pioneer walks away, it is a sad day. "the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one"

On a happy note, RSS is strong enough to stand alone. Those who criticized it as "Dave's standard" have now lost a big arrow. As painful as I know it was, Dave did the right thing and set RSS free. Now we'll see if his critics can show any of the "right stuff." 

I have never met, spoken to, or corresponded with Dave Winer. He has certainly never heard of me and will likely never see this post. I'm just an old fart expressing my opinion and my gratitude.

Thank you, Dave, for everything.

Thanks for the Creative Chaos. Dave Winer announced Friday that he is leaving the RSS Advisory Board on July 1.

By happenstance yesterday, a Google search brought me to Dave's five-year-old mailing list post on XML-DEV introducing RSS:

RSS is an XML-based format that represents what we in the Frontier community call a "weblog". It's frequently updated site that points to stories on and off-site, that identifies an audience and feeds links to them. Until RSS came along the only format people were using was HTML. RSS changed that.

At the time Dave made this post, the concept of weblogs was so new you had to explain it, even to the plugged-in crowd reading XML-DEV. RSS was an obscure format that a handful of Web publishers adopted so they could appear on Netscape.Com. There were only two RSS aggregators in the world -- the one on Netscape and the brand-new My.UserLand.Com. Jeff Barr developed Carmen's Headline Viewer, the first desktop aggregator, in direct response to Dave's announcement.

Without Dave, RSS probably would have died when Netscape abandoned its customized news portal and took the RSS specification offline.

The issue of whether Dave co-created RSS is a can of worms, but even if you don't share my belief that he did, he deserves the most credit for making that distinction matter. (No one argues about who invented CDF.)

Dave recognized five years ago that RSS would be a competitor to HTML. Then he made that crazy notion real, tirelessly evangelizing the concept of simple XML-based publishing in both word and code.

I was asked last night by a reporter whether Dave's resignation would shift the focus of syndication "away from personalities." Perhaps it will, and there will undoubtedly be people who view that as a welcome change.

Who knows in what perverted ways this content will flow around the net? I'm totally looking forward to the creative chaos that's coming!

Five years after Dave predicted "creative chaos," 125,000 syndication feeds are consumed around the clock by an audience that may surpass one million. RSS has become so important to the Internet that dozens of talented developers have worked for more than a year on an attempt to beat it.

I hope that people on all sides of the syndication debate recognize the role that one personality played in bringing us to this point and share their thanks with the world.

Using RSS. [Workbench]

Dave, thank you for RSS.

Yesterday Dave announced his resignation from the RSS advisory board. I'm sorry to see Dave go, but think his rationale is spot-on and am excited about the upcoming open source release of Frontier and the possibilities it opens. I like Steve Gillmor's graduation day metaphor. Awesome.

The title of this post is something that IMO doesn't get said enough. I don't think syndication got to where it is today by accident. I think it took a lot of hard work. The technology had to be developed, promoted, used. Specs had to be written and competitors allowed to enter the market, so that there could be a market. Data formats had to coalesce so that the little guys could compete on features instead of on compatibility.

At the least I think we can say that Dave's played a large role in making syndication happen. I've actually said this to Dave in person: "Dave, thank you for RSS". That's how much enjoyment I get out of writing applications for this space.

[Andrew Grumet's Weblog]

ReSSignation. Dave decided to step down from the RSS Advisory Board, leaving 3 members; Andrew, Rogers and me.

I haven't spoken to the other board members about this yet, but I presume they will want to continue, as do I. We're getting very close to some big breakthroughs in aggregator land that I find quite exciting.

[Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]