It happened in October 2000 in NYC. I met with Adam Curry over a couple of days at a hotel in midtown on the west side. I mention the meeting in a post on December 28, 2000. Here's an excerpt. #
It helps to have a user in mind when you're developing. In NY, when I met with Adam for two days he kept trying to explain what he wanted, but he's not a software developer, so to my ears it came across like hodgepodge. But I listened anyway, I kept trying to feed back what I heard, but we weren't connecting. #
When I got back home I did what programmers do, I iterated, and kept showing it to him. Is this what you wanted? Eventually we got there, this software hits his button. It's also a framework for his vision for last yard connectivity. You can move huge pieces of content without any waiting and using the bandwidth that you don't use. When you're home sleeping in your bed your desktop system can get the big stuff, you won't even know it's there until it's fully downloaded on your hard disk.#
This is how video and music are going to move over the net in 2001. Who would have thought RSS would play a role in this? Adam did.#
This was the key idea on podcasting. How to distribute large bits of audio and video without having to wait for them to download. At the time, it was the slowness of the net that stood in the way of what we now call podcasting. #
The significance of this is that it was 20 years ago. It led to a new version of RSS which supported enclosures for the first time. I also wrote this up on the blog that month. And the software called MUOTD became Radio UserLand, which was a two-way blogging and reading app for RSS. It's something the software industry hasn't replicated, not because it's so hard technically, it isn't. Not sure why. #
The two-day meetup was on October 25 and 26. It still took a couple of months from then before we had any real demos. It was competing with other projects we had at UserLand at the time. #
There was also a Scripting News dinner at Katz's Deli on Houston St during the same visit on October 25. #
Last update: Sunday December 13, 2020; 12:23 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! :-)