An article with the overly dramatic title Blogs locked in a bitter battle By Paul Festa, CNET News.com (August 4, 2003) attempts to summarize the current catfight over RSS:

"The conflict centers on something called Really Simple Syndication (RSS), a technology widely used to syndicate blogs and other Web content. The dispute pits Harvard Law School fellow Dave Winer, the blogging pioneer who is the key gatekeeper of RSS, against advocates of a different format. The most notable of these advocates are Blogger owner Google and Sam Ruby, an influential IBM developer who is now shepherding an RSS alternative through its early stages of development."

I take issue with the article's inference that blogs are mainly for personal and creative uses. They're really a generic publishing tool, just as well suited to business communication or research as they are to online diaries. Just to be fair, though, recent postings of the cats in this fight haven't always been businesslike.

The article does a fair job of presenting the debate about technology development through standards committees, the tradeoffs and concerns of working via committee vs. through an individual.

My take? We're accustomed to having to deal with multiple technical formats. If you're in the business of writing news aggregators or blog publishing tools, take note. If you're a user of these tools, be ready to upgrade to those that support reading and writing in multiple formats. Then let the best format win.

(link thanks to Lonn Henrichsen)

12:37:12 PM