Tech discussions on FriendFeed 

Lately there have been some interesting technical discussions on FriendFeed that I'd like to connect with the technical people in the Scripting News community.

1. Yesterday the question came up why designers of web services reinvent serialization formats instead of reusing existing ones. This is the advantage of XML-RPC. A simple set of types, structs and lists, and a huge set of libraries for all languages. You can write cross network apps at a very high level. An interesting discussion followed, it was nice to close this loop.

2. DeWitt Clinton, a programmer at Google who I've been corresponding with, asked a great question, that I was happy to answer: "Dave, if you could go back in time, would you have used JSON instead of XML for RSS, OPML, XML-RPC, etc, had JSON been popularized at the time?" I think some people will be surprised by my answer, which contained a shout-out to Eric Raymond.

3. I mentioned in one of the discussions and should mention here that I'm thinking about doing a successor to XML-RPC, adding OAuth support. There is some interest, when I mentioned it on Twitter last week I heard back from the people working on WordPress saying they were planning something there. Now that's I've successfully tackled OAuth, it seems it would be a small matter (hah) to take another look at RPC. (It would have a new name, as is the deal with frozen formats like RSS and XML-RPC.) It's now 11 years old, it seems that's enough time to take another look.

What about Sy Hersh? 

At breakfast this morning, Berkeley friend and former journalist John Feld said we need journalists to do impartial investigations into government corruption. I asked if he knew of any and he said Seymour Hersh. I agreed.

When he comes out with a piece, I stop everything and read it, as do many others.

John is right, what Hersh does is important, so we should consider that a real challenge. How do we pay for the work he does, and others who want to follow in his footsteps.

Isn't academia the place for a person like Hersh? Isn't that what we want our tenured faculty to be doing -- digging for the truth, no matter where it leads or who is offended? That's what academic freedom is all about.

It would also be great if such "academic journalists" could teach a course or graduate seminar to share their process, teach students how to do what he or she does.

I think it would be even better than having them work for big media companies, because then they could go after the BMCs, and lord knows they need going-after.

Jon Stewart reviews CNBC