SalonHerringWiredFool.Com
Wednesday, October 27, 1999 by Dave Winer.
Good morning! 
If you've been watching Internet syndication technology, today, I have lots of food for thought for you!
A new site
First, there's a new site on the air today:
http://www.salonherringwiredfool.com/
A combination of four great content flows. An experiment in the Internet. A new smart website.
Why Salon, Red Herring, Wired News, Motley Fool?
Red Herring and Motley Fool cover the web from a financial viewpoint; Wired and Salon with a business and cultural view.
All four are interesting and eclectic, and all four support the new XML standard for content syndication.
http://www.salonherringwiredfool.com/aboutThisSite
Put together, this is the thinking-person's web, circa 2000 -- an interesting market, one that new technology makes even more interesting.
Controversy and comment
This new site will surely be controversial. Basically I want to start a discussion, and see where it goes. And I didn't want it to be a theoretical discussion, I wanted to have a live site, on the air, changing every hour, perhaps even covering itself, in a way, if the various pubs decide to address the question on their sites as well as ours.
Some interesting questions have already been raised and addressed:
http://discuss.userland.com/msgReader$12391
Is this somewhere that the Internet wants to go? I couldn't think of four publications I'd rather explore this question with. I have enormous respect for all, as a reader, as a technology partner, and in the case of Wired, as a former editor.
An open source milestone in aggregation
Our partnership with O'Reilly Associates is bearing fruit too!
http://discuss.userland.com/msgReader$12394
The XML-based UserLand story flow has now made its way to an O'Reilly server, running Unix, with hourly updates. The application is written in Perl and the data is stored in the MySql relational database.
http://www.oreillynet.com/cgi-bin/affil/viewData.pl
Shortly, the syndicated content flow will be available to any website that runs Perl and has a relational database. Our partner O'Reilly will help make that work.
Do you believe in the web?
We're flipping the equation on the ICE formula for content syndication, as supported by Vignette and iSyndicate:
http://davenet.userland.com/1999/09/03/theDarkSideOfSyndication
It's a dark-side-light-side thing. A clear choice. Do you believe in the web? Or do you believe in portals?