It's even worse than it appears.
Sunday January 19, 2020; 9:58 AM EST
  • I've been having a big change of thinking re RSS.#
  • In 1999, I compromised. I wanted journalism and blogging to share a common format. So I ditched the format I designed and accepted Netscape's adaptation in its place, to create unity. And it worked, it was the level playing field I had hoped for. Blogging and journalism both thrived in RSS. But at a price. #
  • The price was forcing blogs into the same format that news orgs used. Problem is, as we can see clearly with Twitter, that format isn't the only one. As Twitter discovered, its style of writing doesn't fit into the model of RSS. People were disappointed when they stopped publishing tweets via RSS. But this was the right thing to do, in hindsight. It wasn't working.#
  • I turned a corner in 2017 with my blog. I realized then, though I wouldn't have put it this way, the price I paid by merging formats with Netscape was too great. It forced blogging into the title-description-body model of journalism. But blog posts are more free-form, they don't all fit into that structure. #
  • So now I'm thinking about what I could have done differently in 1999, if I had evolved my syndication format the way my blog wanted to go, not the way RSS pushed us. #

© 1994-2020 Dave Winer.

Last update: Sunday January 19, 2020; 7:18 PM EST.

You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)