Scripting News for 3/1/2006

Announcement: “The public review of OPML 2.0 begins.” 

OPML 2.0 is easy to understand if you’re intelligent, have common sense and are patient. I explain, in this podcast, why the improvements in OPML 2.0 will help users.  

Here’s what the CIO Insight interview with me looks like. Pretty funny! Do I really look like that?  

When Joan Crawford saw a picture of herself at age 69 or so, she said “If that’s what I look like you’ll never see me again.” They told her that’s what she looks like and she was never seen in public again. 

Nicholas Carr: “Edgeio enters a crowded market with a ton of pizzazz and a gram of strategy.” 

This can’t possibly be true, but if it is, I’m going to rename my podcast the Morning Coffee Notes Podcast Show, and find out whose lawyer is doing this.  

I love the way people are not buying Apple’s horse crap this time. For crying out loud, it’s a g-d stereo. I had one of those when I was 15 and that was 35 years ago! 

Meanwhile, the mini-crisis in RSS appears to be over, as the group that was proposing to be the authority on the evolution of RSS has turned, and is now producing a best practices document, which is totally consistent with the roadmap because anyone can produce a best practices doc, Uncle Juan in Beirut can produce one, so can Aunt Alice in Bucharest. You can pick your plan, they can compete in the market, and everyone gets a choice. We live with the imperfections of RSS 2.0, because that’s the way life is. Nothing and no one is exactly as we’d like them to be. Whew! That was hard work. Glad it’s over.  

Rick Segal and I go to lunch, and he gets an email from the CEO of a blogging tools company asking why Rick is “sucking up.” That is so ridiculous, and beneath comment, if it weren’t so common. Have the guts to put your name on a dumb comment like that. It leads to other people being openly rude just to prove they’re not sucking up, and that’s totally not constructive. Let’s deal with each other as mature adults, let’s get out of the mode where civilized behavior is considered cowardly. In fact it’s cowardly to make personal attacks like that, anonymously. 

Gabe rolls out a new esthetic for M-O-R. “A general reduction in rate of eye injury,” he says. First impression: Nice! 

Sam Ruby responds to yesterday’s post here.  

A bunch of people want to know what Marc Canter’s picture is doing here on Scripting News. Easy. It’s a cool picture. And when you click on it, a bigger story is revealed. More coolness! Still mysterious. That’s what I like.  

 

Scripting News for 2/28/2006

Steven Cohen has become an incredible evangelist for OPML. 

I got an email from Scott Rosenberg at Salon describing an experiment they’d like to try with Scripting News and you, the readers of Scripting News. First, I’m going to get a comp subscription, so I can read everything on their site that subscribers pay for. Then when I see an article I find interesting, in my aggregator, I can read it, without going through the painful process of getting a free pass for the day by watching an ad, which I do very rarely only for articles that have great appeal. Maybe once a month, if that often. Then if I choose to link to the article, you’ll be able to read the article without going through the get-a-pass process too. It’s worth a try. Salon occasionally gets an important story that should be included in the record here, but I haven’t been willing to point to the articles ever since they went behind the for-pay firewall. Now I’ll be able to point to Salon again.  

Gabe teases about changes-to-come at M-O-R.  

My own teaser. First there was RSS 2.0. Then Web 2.0. Tomorrow, the next 2.0.  

Five years ago today: “Ole and Lena were laying in bed one night when the phone rang. Ole answered it and Lena heard him yell, ‘Well, how the hell should I know, that’s over 2000 miles away!’ and he hung up. Lena says ‘Who was that Ole?’ Ole says ‘The hell if I know, some weirdo wants to know if the coast is clear.’” 

Flickr pic: “After a few days of intense rain, it was nice to see the sun today, however briefly. And with sun and rain, of course, came a rainbow. Sweet!” 

Apple: “For $349, iPod Hi-Fi delivers crystal-clear, audiophile-quality sound in a clean, compact design.” 

Steve Gillmor is live-blogging the Apple announcement. 

Best wishes to Joey and Wendy the deVilla family on the passing of Joey’s father yesterday.  

Glenn Reynolds is being interviewed live on WAMU. It’s a call-in show, so call in. 

A brilliant and insightful piece about RSS from Dion Hinchcliffe. Last week I was emailing with an architect at one of the major enterprise software companies, a huge company with offices all over the world. She told me that RSS 2.0 has become the framework for all their work now, completely replacing J2EE. She wondered if that was my plan. I said it wasn’t — that was what SOAP was supposed to do. But SOAP got all screwed up by exactly the kind of tech BS that’s starting to happen now with RSS. It’s probably too late for the tech companies to screw it up, RSS 2.0 has too much momentum and too many people are happy with what it does, and the Roadmap provides an adequate escape valve for the pressure to innovate. But we need to keep our eyes and ears open. Given the chance, Silicon Valley and Redmond will definitely screw it up.  

Eric Norlin posted on Dion’s piece at almost exactly the same moment. 

Here’s an illustration of tech industry interference with RSS. That’s Sam Ruby, the lead of the Atom working group, an employee of IBM, trying to rewrite the rules of RSS 2.0. Do you understand what he’s saying? I don’t. Assuming he means well, which I think is a stretch (he’s got a huge conflict of interest) he surely doesn’t understand the phillosophy of RSS 2.0. Does management at IBM know he’s doing this, is this part of a strategy to keep their lock on the enterprise software business, which RSS clearly is a threat to? Like Sam, they have a conflict of interest too. In the tech world, I’ve learned that if you think the worst of people’s motives you’re usually right. IBM doesn’t generally go for the high road. In any case, IBM should call him off, now. Atom is fine, let people use that if they want, but if you screw with RSS, we’re going to shine the light on you. 

Hey it’s Fat Tuesday! Laissez les bons temps rouler. 

Brian Oberkirch has a Mardi Gras music podcast from New Orleans. He lives in Slidell, Louisiana, a town that’s both on the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Pontchartrain; it was almost exactly where the eye of Katrina made landfall. I met Bruce at the TechCrunch tent party earlier this month. (After I clicked, I realized it’s a strange variant of podcast, each of the songs are a separate download as an MP3. I’ve never seen RSS used that way, it’s cool, but weird. It’s basically a playlist.) 

I’m listening to Brian’s music now. It’s the best stuff. Poignant and bittersweet now that it’s gone. Hoo weee.  

Hey you want to know how to dance to this stuff? No problem, here’s a tutorial. You can even dance while you’re nerding out at the computer, checking out your email, surfing Meme-o-randum. Just let your body move to the music and put a stupid smile on your face! It’s easy, chat. 

To celebrate Fat Tuesday, I wrote a script for OPML Editor users that downloads Brian’s Carnival Cast.  

Today’s excitement will no doubt be a new product from Apple, announced at a press event in San Francisco, which unfortunately I am not A-list enough to attend. And tonight, Scott Johnson and Betsy Devine are hosting a dinner where Scott will announce some new mysterious thing called Ookles. I admit I find the name so cute as to be irritating. But I’ll go anyway, just for the schmooze and to see Betsy, who I did a podcast with last year, at a breakfast in Cambridge. The 20-year old babe-like Betsy made an appearance at the top of Scripting News earlier this month, and in the margin of this post. 

A perfect four-paragraph short story in blog form. That, I think, owing to the limited attention span of web readers, may turn out to be the blog’s contribution to literature. That, or the perfect four-paragraph op-ed piece.  

Last time I saw fellow Berkeleyite Scott Rosenberg, at some local dinner, I remarked that while I agree with everything he writes, and I mean everything, it’s also true that I disagree with everything he says when we meet face to face. I can’t resolve this paradox. But it happened again. Here’s a Scott Rosenberg blog post. I found myself chuckling, then laughing out loud. Yeah it’s the truth, what he says — that does not seem likely.  

Scripting News for 2/27/2006

CBS: “President Bush’s approval rating has fallen to an all-time low of 34 percent.” 

Earlier this month I was interviewed by Ed Cone at CIO Insight about RSS, podcasting, blogs and what’s next.  

Iced Coffee & A Bagel: “I think New Orleans is now one of the most technologically advanced cities in the U.S.” 

I’ve seen reports from OPML Editor/Mac users that they aren’t seeing icons on outline headings. It’s a known problem, and a workaround was found in September. The 1.0 release of the editor won’t have this problem.  

Terry Heaton: Public Broadcasting needs a new name. 

Keith Teare: Edgeio has launched. 

Actors 

I just got through a Joan Crawford binge, the best you can do at Netflix, which isn’t very good, compared to a Joan Crawford Month on Turner Classic Movies. Netflix has just two old-time Crawford movies, there are probably about a dozen really good ones, and I like the mediocre ones too. Basically I like anything with Joan Crawford, before 1950 or so, when she turned into a horror movie actress, and looked the part. Most people don’t know that she was a real cutie in the 20s and 30s, and then hardened into a great dramatic actress in the 40s. Born in 1908, her age tracked the year of the century, minus eight.

I’ve also heard a lot of the hearsay of Crawford the person, that she was always in character, a promiscuous party girl, a dancer and flapper, and she was devoted to her fans. She always was gracious signing autographs, visited with her fan clubs, thought of her fans as the reason for her success. More power to her, maybe that’s why I like her movies so much, even though, of course I never met her, she was past her prime before I was born.

In public when a star acts like a person, the fan can become quite abusive, I know I’ve seen it with my own eyes. And these days they have their own publications (blogs, duh) so their opinions are heard much more widely. I didn’t realize this until very recently, on returning to the Bay Area, where my celebrity is at its maximum, that’s why I’ve come to dislike public tech events more and more over time, and go to fewer. I’d like to be treated like a person, I really don’t like being a celebrity, I am not an actor.

What’s the difference? I’m willing to sell you my ideas, but I’m not out to sell you me. I keep that for myself. So when you ask me what I think, I tell you. I don’t tell you what I think you want to hear. I do that because that’s what I want, I want to know what people think. Not about stupid stuff, like your or my quality as a human being, that’s so childish. I want to know what you think. I want the product of your intellect. I want to create together, I ache to create together. Instead what I’ve been able to find so far is a world that criticizes me for not being enough of a movie star. Arrrgh! I’m not a fucking movie star.

I guess what I want to say is that blogging really is different. It’s a temporary abberration that there is such a thing as an A-list. That’s going to go away. They (we) will get disintermediated just like everything else that the Internet touches. It was never my intention to get in anyone’s way. I will get out of the way eventually, when my work is finished, and I think that’s pretty soon, but that doesn’t mean you will get to take my place (that seems to be what so many want). This stuff is more like telephones and cars, lots of people have one, and no one is a gatekeeper for the others. That there are stars is, I think, a vestige of the world we’re leaving behind.

Who we are, you and I 

If you saw me in a restaurant while I’m eating dinner, and overheard part of my story, but not the whole thing, and then proceeded to address the whole restaurant, claiming I was wrong, and immoral, and not a nice fellow, and I should stop eating right now and go fix the problem (even though you didn’t hear the whole story) I wouldn’t say “Now wait a minute Dave, he’s just like a customer and you’d better not tell him he’s wrong.” Instead, I’d say to my companion, this guy doesn’t trust me, and I’d be being generous at that.

In my world the writer is a person who tells you what he thinks and lets everything else fall off from there. This is not television, these are not bedtime stories, they aren’t about you. If you can’t be bothered to actually read a three paragraph short story, and get it right, then I’m sure not going to pretend you’re right. Instead, you become part of the randomness, the art, the world that’s too busy to listen.

In my world, the reader is an adult who is responsible for what he or she says. I write for a person who is college educated, probably a few semesters of literature. You can’t just skim my essays and get the point, if you do, and then comment, you’ll probably have missed something important. That doesn’t seem to stop most people who do comment, I’ve observed.

Scripting News for 2/26/2006

A new prefs system is on the way for the OPML Editor.  

Tim King wants to edit a day’s worth of WordPress posts in his outliner. I haven’t released the code that does this, but I could clean it up and ship it. Hmmm. 

Sunday night on WAMU is old-time radio. Drama, comedy and westerns. I just listened to Dragnet, then Gunsmoke, now The Life of Riley. Later tonight is President Truman’s inaugural.  

Lisa Williams: “Offline editors are from Mars, the OPML Editor is from Venus.” 

On this day in 1998, I released the source code for the Scripting News website. I bet it would work in today’s OPML Editor. Should I give it a try? (No-go, the files were on a server that’s long gone.) 

Brooklyn Joe created a NY Yankees reading list. Oh man, you can tell I’m really behind reading lists because there are two weird things going on here. First, the Yankees? You gotta be kidding. Second, what’s a guy from Brooklyn doing rooting for the Yankees. Hope he doesn’t tell his neighbors in Brooklyn he’s doing that. Brooklyn is on Long Island, and folks, that’s National League territory. Let’s get clear on that. But even if the guy is a traitor to his homeland, and without any discernable philosophy, at least he’s getting behind OPML reading lists. Which in balance, gets him a link on Scripting News. For now.  

Sunday morning bluegrass on WAMU. This station is such a score. Last night they played an hour of hometown New Orleans funky jazz. One great hit after another. Yehi.  

Scott Karp’s Publishing 2.0 is becoming a must-read blog. He’s trying to figure things out. Good on him.  

Samantha Schutz is the daughter of a friend of my mom’s in NY and she’s written a book and it’s been published. Cool. What a title! 

Hey I just linked to Amazon, I’ve been doing that lately, just a little, as I’ve relaxed a bit about patents. I’ve come to appreciate that this isn’t a very kind world to creative people, lots of nasty people try to take anything that isn’t locked up and nailed down. When patents are used to protect creativity, I guess they have a place. Not happy about that. I still don’t support, in any way, the predatory way Amazon has used patents to take ideas out of the commons for themselves. It’s the same way I feel about companies hijacking open formats, trying to take control of other people’s creativity, without even offering to pay for it. Geez talk about greed. That’s why it’s cool that Dave Sifry respected my request to get out of the awkward place he found himself. There are other companies that haven’t yet responded, and I’m not going to pull any punches if they don’t get out the place they don’t belong. No one is the Boss Man of the stuff I gave away.  

Flickr photos from Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans. 

John Fraser: “I can’t get my subscription list out of Safari, which makes portability an issue.” [Postscript] 

Doc Searls and son nail snowboarding. It has a lot to do with falling on your ass and annoying skiers.  

Scripting News for 2/25/2006

I had a long Dim Sum lunch in SF yesterday with Matt Mullenweg, the lead developer of WordPress. We talked about a lot of things, it was very pleasant and very productive. 

This comment is becoming more frequent in the OPML community, and I’m glad people are thinking about how long the free hosting is going to last, because, while I have no plans to stop hosting sites for free, it will eventually happen, and when it does, it’s better if people are prepared. One thing that’s cool is that all the data resides on your system, I’m just rendering it, so you won’t ever lose the data because the server went down. Also, since all the software is GPL, it’s possible that at some point a commercial service will offer hosting. In fact, I’m kind of trying to drive things that way, so that at some point the idea will occur to a business-person, hey I could offer these people a service and make some money. It hasn’t happened yet, but I hope it will someday, hopefully soon.  

In tech, when someone says something is complicated, check it out, they’re probably trying to confuse you. That’s why I called it Really Simple Syndication, as a clue. If it’s really simple, what could be confusing?  

When I meet someone who says they’re thinking of quitting, but they hear it’s really hard, I say nahh, that’s just what the tobacco industry wants you to think. It’s actually much easier than they say. You quit smoking by not smoking one day, then not smoking the second day. And so on through the first week. All you have to do is deal with the cravings, which can be really irritating, because the drug is addictive. There’s an drug called Wellbutrin that can diminish the cravings. Anyway, millions of people have quit, so how hard could it really be? After the first week it’s much easier. And then it gets ridiculously easy. Eventually your body tunes in to how harmful it is, and that makes it no trick to stay unaddicted.  

Amyloo has a gorgeous mockup of an OPML Editor site. Oooooh. I like it!! 

Essay: Why the backchannel is bad for RSS. 

Brad Feld posted the letter that prompted the essay above. 

Eric: “Every time somebody decides to ‘fix’ the standard, I get one more RSS variant to crawl.” 

Why the backchannel is bad for RSS

This is a verbatim copy of an emal I sent to Brad Feld of Mobius Venture Capital.

Brad, I appreciate you taking a proactive role, but there’s something that’s not right about all this — we need to get out of the backchannel and have this discussion in public. So many reasons for it.

1. People, rightly, complain that they had a right to be in the loop on whatever we’re talking about. They absolutely do. I know what it feels like, because I’m completely in the dark on how Rogers got to this point. At one point in the discussion with he, myself and John Palfrey at Harvard, they took it private, and I didn’t even know the conversation was continuing. There are too many dark spots.

2. If you recall, I asked if questions about RSS would be decided in Feedburner board meetings. Of course they would have been if this had gone forward as conceived. Do you see how wrong that is? RSS is not your property.

3. You talk about examining the record. It’s important that people be able to do that. Well, people coming back trying to figure out what happened here, unless Rogers decides to show us his mail archives, won’t be able to do that.

4. There are other dark spots Brad, places you and I can’t get into. Those are the times other people tried to take RSS private, to take it for themselves. I’ve never seen the converse, a private discussion that resulted in something good for the community.

5. Backchannel begets more backchannel. If you’re working with Rogers in the backchannel, then I have to work with you in the backchannel, otherwise he has an unfair advantage, and when we’re in conflict like this (not my choice btw) I can’t give the other guy that kind of advantage. Even so most all of what I said, I said in public where everyone could see it.

6. RSS is a public thing. I don’t know how to say it better. Since you’ve made such a big bet here, I think you need to understand this. This probably won’t be the last mess you’ll get dragged into. This is one of the reasons I sought you out at Gnomedex. RSS is serious stuff, and not much fun, I’m afraid. But it’s very important that it be protected.

So my feeling is, if you have something to say about this, it should be on your blog or on a mail list, otherwise don’t say it.

Dave

PS: I’m cc’ing Palfrey, so he can see how this looks. I have no visibility into his conversations with Rogers, I don’t know who decided to cut me out of the loop, or why. (I have ideas about that, but I don’t actually know.)

It’s their world, not mine

Listening to Art Buchwald on the radio, being interviewed by Diane Rehm. He’s in a hospice, having refused treatment for kidney disease, so he’s dying. It takes a lot of guts to talk with a guy who’s about to die, but what an interview! Wow. Made me think of so many things.

One was a problem I’m having with a bank that’s been sending me someone else’s statements. The circumstances aren’t important, I’ve been on the phone with them for a few hours over a few days, trying to get them to stop sending me the statements. They’ve even agreed, at times to stop sending them; to no avail, they keep coming, and every time it’s an argument to explain to them that I’m not the guy and I’m not responsible for his business.

During the last call I had this strong feeling that I’m going to die before winning this one. And with that came the realization — it’s their world not mine. They’re like the mountains and the oceans and I’m like a sunny day. They’ll be here torturing people like me, until we die, and then they’ll torture other people, who will die and so on.

Scripting News for 2/24/2006

David Wilkinson has a mockup of an OPML Editor 1.0 website for review. It’s a little homey, imho, I was hoping for more color, like the Firefox download site. Maybe even with rounded corners and Ajax-ish tech. 

I’m thinking about a series of OPML Roadshows in April, to take the 1.0 release around the U.S. to show it off. So far I’ve asked about venues in Cambridge, New York and Seattle. Obviously there would have to be one in the Bay Area. Maybe this time (I’m going to get in trouble for this) London.  

It was a rougher week on the net than you could see on the mail lists. I’m getting pushed around again, that’s the bad news. The good news is that a bunch of people wanted to get a flamefest going with me as the guest of honor, and it didn’t take root. Even so, I have reached a new level of exhaustion, and that’s not a good thing. In some conversations, I’ve tried, to no avail, to explain that I am a real person, not an object, and I’m just asking to be treated as you would treat anyone else. But I’m also an A-lister, and a celebrity, and being treated like an object comes with the territory. But I’m also a blogger, and I’m sorry, I just doing go for the regal treatment. Anyway, maybe next week will be better. I sure hope so. 

Sean Kaye: “My great concern is that companies like the ones above will ’simplify’ the standard for themselves thus making it considerably more complicated for everyone else and far less effective than it is now.” The companies are Six Apart, Feedburner, Technorati, Newsgator and Socialtext. 

Thanks to Dave Sifry at Technorati for helping RSS get out of conflict.  

Press-Republican: “Dr Robert Johnson, a Democrat from Sackets Harbor, near Watertown, who is challenging incumbent Republican John McHugh in the 23rd District, said he was denied access aboard a Continental Airlines flight to Florida on Jan 17 from Syracuse after officials informed him that he was on a ‘no-fly’ list.” 

Essay: It’s their world, not mine. 

Rex Hammock: “It’s a mistake when anyone attempts to place mass-media business metrics to defining success or failure of a weblog.” 

Blogging for newbies 

When I encourage people to start a blog here’s what I suggest they do.

First, create a new weblog on one of the free services, like Blogger or MSN Spaces. It takes about five minutes, and is about as hard as creating an email address on Yahoo or Hotmail, and represents less of a commitment. Then make your first post, something like Hello There, or Testing 1-2-3. Once you’ve verified that it works, you can stop there.

Then someday, when you’re in the shower or lying in bed in the morning and get an idea that you wish you could tell everyone, remember that you have a blog, and go to the computer, and write it up and publish it. That actually feels pretty good, even if you think no one will read it, because you got it off your chest.

Then in a few days Google will probably visit your site and index the post, and then when someone searches for that subject, your page will come up, and maybe you’ll pass that idea on to someone who can use it, or meet someone who agrees, or someone who disagrees. And that’s blogging, and that’s all it is.

To illustrate the point, this morning I woke up thinking that I should really post my standard blogging pitch. And there, a few minutes later, it is.

The elevator pitch for OPML blogging 

At lunch on Sunday with Rick Segal, the Toronto venture capitalist, and ex-Microsoft fighter pilot, he asked if anything new was coming in blogging. I said yes, there is, something big.

And so there is. People who use the OPML Editor for blogging know what it is. And I even have the elevator pitch, and it’s been tested on Rick Segal, and it works. It goes like this.

Did you ever have an idea you wanted to post on your blog that didn’t seem big enough to be an essay? An idea that could be expressed in a sentence, or less, but still deserved to get out there? In writing school they teach that less is better. If you can say someting in three words instead of twenty, say it in three. It communicates better. Well, none of the existing blogging tools can do little sentence or phrase-size blog posts.

That’s what we’re doing, perfecting a tool for easier, quicker, blogging on a smaller scale.

Don’t forget 

Commenting is back. Your thoughts are welcome!

But please keep it friendly. Thanks.

How much has been invested in RSS?

In yesterday’s piece I wrote of the RSS 2.0 roadmap: “There’s a huge community that has invested billions of dollars around its assumptions.”

Sounds good, but while I was riding on the BART yesterday for a lunch appointment in San Francisco I wondered if it’s true, and if so, how you’d come up with an estimate of what the investment is.

One way of measuring it is to take the dollar value of the time that has been invested by various organizations and people. So, for example, how much money has the NY Times put into its RSS support? A million? Two? And the Christian Science Monitor, Time-Warner, AP, Reuters, BBC, etc. The University of California, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Florida, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Waterloo, Oxford, Moscow and Beijing and the U.S. Department of State, the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture. It would take quite a while to even make a list of all the different kinds of organizations that have made and continue on an ongoing basis to invest in RSS, much less the organizations themselves.

And then there’s the technology of RSS. Brad Feld has invested millions of dollars in Feedburner, Newsgator and Technorati. My former colleagues Jim Moore and John Palfrey in Cambridge have raised a $100 million fund entirely designated for RSS. We were impressed a couple of years ago with Apple’s investment in RSS, but quietly, that investment has deepened. There’s now a link on the home page of apple.com to a huge collection of feeds that are updated presumably on an ongoing basis. And then there’s podcasting, which is also RSS. Kleiner-Perkins invested $8.5 million in Podshow, and another sizable chunk of money went to Odeo, and those are just the deals we know about. National Public Radio in the U.S. is continuing to invest in podcasting. My bet is that their over-the-airwaves distribution system will become much less important than the over-the-net system, which of course is RSS top-to-bottom. What’s the annual budget of NPR and what portion of that should we allocate to RSS?

And then there’s Microsoft. A company that employs over 50,000 people, many of whom are part of their multi-billion-dollar R&D budget, a company that just filed plans to build yet another campus in the Seattle area. They’ve made an impressive committment to RSS in their upcoming operating system. If RSS delivers, and we think it will, how much will they be investing in an ongoing basis in RSS?

Okay this isn’t my specialty, but firms like Forrester and Gartner are experts in estimating dollar-value of investment. Maybe they should be tracking this, along with their estimates of the size of the user base.

And why should we care? Well I care because it would help to explain to my colleagues in the XML world why it isn’t so easy to reinvent RSS. Do the math. Let’s say the actual number is, for the sake of argument, $8.2 billion. What does that look like?

Here’s one way to visualize it. Let’s assume the average home price in the U.S. is $400K. So $8.2 billion is about 21,000 houses. Now imagine you wanted to change the way the plumbing worked in all of those homes. You get the idea. There’s no way 4 or 5 random people on a Yahoo mail list, people of ordinary means, can move that much capital without having a pretty compelling argument and making it an incredibly compelling way. Even if you had the money and would give it to all the companies that had invested, you’d have to account for the opportunity costs in rebuilding the infrastructure around a new set of assumptions. That kind of change never seems to happen. People still drive on the right side in the U.S. and on the left in Japan and the U.K. The world runs on the metric system, except the U.S. which still uses the English system. In New York City the IRT, the IND and the BMT still use different rail gauges, meaning you can’t move the trains from one system down the tracks of the other. Don’t forget the QWERTY typewriters that were designed to be hard to use but difficult to jam. Conventions don’t change easy.

Viewed another way, given that Scripting News, for years, was the central if not primary means of distributing information about RSS, it gives you a sense of how powerful blogging is. It can’t move that much capital overnight, but given enough time, and persistence, and a high-quality idea, you can create quite an economic effect.

Scripting News for 2/23/2006

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?