I have to say, a consistent theme in my career has been, I create something, through a lot of work and trial and error, and years later it's out and people like it. And then people say thanks for doing that, now I'll take over. The first time I saw that in a huge way was with OPML. It came a couple of years after RSS's success, and a lot of people assumed OPML would be big and they could get rich if they owned it. I had a colleague at Harvard even tell me literally he was going to take over now. Those were the words he used. He had no idea what OPML was! I thought this is the height of ridiculousness. It got so awful I just dropped the project, to let them all fail, which is exactly what happened. These things aren't designed to get anyone rich. There is no lock-in possible so nothing to charge money for. How stupid can you be. Obviously, I learned the lesson that people can be very very very stupid. And unbelievably, larcenously, greedy. (BTW, the guy from Harvard was already very rich. He did not need more money. I had been to his house.)#
So many more examples. Like the VCs and RSS. They all lost all their money because they thought a format can be owned. None of them were interested in where I thought the products were, they all created the same product, badly -- and failed. Podcasting, more of the same. My partner, Adam Curry, thought I was just a programmer, and therefore fungible. I am a programmer, for sure -- but I think about things in a different way, there's a part of the stack almost no one else gets into. I see new media before it exists. I work at it. You can't just hire someone to do what I do. That's why my consistent drumbeat is Let's Work Together. Instead of stopping here, there's much more to do and no one gets to do it all. The interchange format isn't ownable. But most people don't get that, and when they bet money that they can, they lose it all. #
Drummer is going to be the anti-silo, as Frontier was. What this meant for Frontier is when we saw a new protocol, our first impulse was to implement it. I wanted it to be able to communicate with anything. A silo'd outliner would instead usually not to support a protocol, and implement everything itself. Watching Roam, I'd say they are a half-silo. When it comes to exporting content from Roam they seem to be fairly liberal. They don't want to implement their own blogging software, for example, they'd prefer to export to a static site generator. But, they are fairly closed to allowing other editing tools to be able to push content into their graph. I wanted to see how at least some of my writing here on Scripting News, in outlines, would look in their graph. As far as I can tell, it might be possible to do, but it would require a lot of work by hand, and no one has time to do that. It would make more sense imho to support some kind of standard interchange format. Luckily, I created one, in the 00s, for just this purpose, and it's pretty broadly supported. Anyway they certainly don't make it easy. They really want me to use their outliner. I'm sure it's very nice, but I already have one. Anyway, like all recent text products and services, you're pretty much locked into using their editor. #
Follow-up to yesterday's braintrust query. Apparently WordPress still has an API, there's a Node package to interface to it, and even better, they still have the XML-RPC interface and support the Metaweblog API. So it should be possible to have WordPress support in Drummer and use the outliner to create and edit posts on a WordPress website, and who knows where that goes. What's especially cool about it is that in December 2019 I released a new reference implementation of XML-RPC in the form of a client and server for Node, in JavaScript of course, and a client that runs in the browser. So now there's a good reason to add XML-RPC support to Drummer, which I totally want to do. #BTW, if someone is looking for an interesting not-too-huge project, hooking up the JavaScript XML-RPC package to WordPress via the MetaWeblog API is a totally self-contained project and would be very helpful. #