Thursday, February 23, 2006

Essay: How much has been invested in RSS? 

I love the political storm President Bush is caught in over the UAE port managers, because it is totally unfair, as he says it is. Of course they're perfectly qualified to manage the ports. They're not terrorists. They employ Americans. There's no extra risk. I love it because it's exactly the kind of dirty trick Bush uses, the same kind of dumb emotional illogic, and like his opponents he's left stammering like an idiot, caught in the headlights, explaining how it's not really an issue. It's the Swift Boat logic turned back at the master. It's as if Karl Rove was working for the Dems. I love it because it's funny and it's justice.  

Helen Rowland: "The follies which a man regrets most, in his life, are those which he didn't commit when he had the opportunity." 

Six years ago today: Spicy noodles! 

Attention to the OPML community. We have work to do.  

Amyloo: "Head on over to the OPML Community blog, sub to both the posts feed and the comments feed." Done. 

Ernie the Attorney endorses Mitch Landrieu for mayor of New Orleans. "We need someone who can build coalitions, inspire passion, promote innovation, and someone who has massive integrity. Mitch will take this job seriously, and will bring a lot of skill to the task." 

An open note to Rogers Cadenhead 

Rogers, I need to get out of the RSS morass, and back to work on new stuff. Could you make your group less of a threat to harmony in RSS-land? Be a sport and listen a little, give a little. You can make a contribution without being Lord Master God of RSS. (I don't want to be that either, I just want to be a friend of RSS and be respected for having played a major role in creating it, and having a pretty good idea about what it is and isn't.)

Here's the compromise I propose. Change the name and charter of the group you've started. Decide whether you're working on a profile or a new format. You can't do what you're doing and call it RSS, that totally breaks the roadmap, and I won't stand by and let that happen. That's the committment I made to the people who implemented RSS, that I would stand with them and protect the roadmap. So as long as you're in conflict with the roadmap, we're in conflict. And I'm not going to argue with you about whether or not you're in conflict, since I'm the author of the roadmap, I reserve that judgement for myself. Someone has to have the last word, and when it comes to the RSS 2.0 roadmap, that's me, not you.

You've said you're concerned because Microsoft is making a strong move into RSS. That's a concern I share, so that's common ground. You've even found reasons to be concerned, things they've done that we need to talk about with them. So define your group on those lines, you're a study group, or a documentation project, or you're designing a tight profile of RSS that's intended to maximize interop, these are things I can support. I hope you see now that my support is worth something, that you can't just blow by me in RSS, and ignore what I say, that that just isn't going to work.

Google page creator 

This evening Google launched a totally unremarkable page creator web app. It's a nice Ajax text editor, with templates, but why isn't it part of Blogger, or at least connected to Blogger, and where is the feed? The sites have no structure.

Where is the Mind of Google these days? Seems to be back in the mid-90s, re-discovering Geocities. Give me a ring when there's at least some rudimentary content management in there.

Here's a sample page. Screen shot.

Score: C.

PS: Support the MetaWeblog API?