Saturday, June 26, 2004

Paul Boutin on the Syndication panel at Supernova. "A crowd like this gets really frustrated when the Wi-Fi drops out during a conference and knocks out their back channel." 

Dave Rogers, who seems to be a source of peace in the community, added a thoughtful post in the thread on Burning Bird. Even the flames don't seem so heavy today. I responded to Dave's post with another. At the end I said: "I offered my role in the future of RSS up as a deposit to prove my intentions were serious. What are you willing to ante up with?" I thought that question was worth asking here, to the leaders of our community who may not see the thread. What are you going to do help the tech-weblog world get back on its feet? "Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet." By the way, in playing the ask-not game, it's okay to think of things other people can do to help, and then ask them to do it.  

Rogers Cadenhead writes another embarassing testimonial to my role in the development of RSS. 

Jessica Baumgart presented blogging to librarians at the Harvard Business School. She also reports that the Thursday group will continue, with the next meeting on July 8.  

Andrew Grumet understands how we got to where we are with RSS today. I heard Bill Kearney say the same thing in an audio roundtable on Doug Kaye's site. Asked why RSS had been so successful, he said "It's open." Kearney has been very critical of my work in many areas for many years, especially RSS. There was a time when most of the people who produced RSS and used RSS did it with my software. At that point there would have been an option to close it up, and not allow others to enter the market. But that was never what I wanted to do. I've always believed in the power of developers working together. I still hold out some hope for that. By stepping aside, I remove one oft-stated reason for people not working together. How ironic, that the thing I wanted most, may only be possible without me. Anyway, life is filled with mysteries. I'm having lunch today with Scott Johnson of Feedster. Maybe I'll hear something strange there too. 

A note to Shelley Powers about the last devastating flamefest.  

Wired: "Visitors get a piece of code that's designed to retrieve from a Russian website software that records a person's keystrokes." 

On 6/26/97, the US Supreme Court overturned the Communications Decency Act. The First Amendment applies to the Internet. There was a party in cyberspace, and in San Francisco.`