Time to come clean on an investment I made a year and a half ago. At the time, UserLand software had released a Mac OSX version of Radio and I was totally digging the built in news aggregator. I came up with a cunning plan: I asked Userland if I could purchase a pre-installed feed on their aggregator, which supports RSS xml feeds. I paid $10,000 for a one year license. To date I've been delighted with my purchase and although I haven't checked recently, I'm pretty sure Userland still has me in the defaults.
Besides investing in the technology with user licenses for Frontier and Radio UserLand, I ponied up to the bar and made a commitment to a format. And now I feel fucked.
The $10k didn't 'just' give me an automatic base within the userland community, it got pasted on web pages all over the world and I've built up an audience that consists of 50% aggergator users.
But this investment is clearly being halted short by the (N)echo project.
So I'm invoking an age olde american tradition of letting my wallet do the talking. I will again invest $10k in aggregator default placements this year, but I will spread it around, to all developers who adhere to RSS2.0. Include (N)echo and you're out of luck.
4:21:09 PM
A powerful opportunity for weblog tool developers and vendors: "We'll make last-minute changes to accomodate you. In other words, the pride-swallowing is two-way. Tell us what you want and we'll do it. This is what never happened with Netscape."
Besides supporting tools that I use that already support the metaweblogAPI, how else can us users help to ensure history doesn't repeat itself?
12:03:52 AM
