Home > Archive >  2009 >  September >  21

What became of Radio's POST button?

Monday, September 21, 2009 by Dave Winer.

An interesting story of evolving software.  Permalink to this paragraph

In 2002, my company shipped a product called Radio UserLand. It was a very popular blogging tool, but it was also the most popular RSS reading tool of the day. And because it was both things, we could do integration that no other product had ever done before, or since.  Permalink to this paragraph

Adjacent to every item in the aggregator was a button that said POST. When you click it, you flip to the blog post entry screen with the text of the item in the big box. You could add your own words, shorten it, whatever you like. When you were done, hit Submit and you'd have a post that pointed to the original article with your comments. Permalink to this paragraph

As an aside, this is where the RSS <source> element came from. We'd embed that, invisibly, in your post so tools could find their way back to the original. This was in response to an outcry from bloggers that we were helping people steal content. Seems like a foreign idea today, doesn't it?  Permalink to this paragraph

Anyway... Permalink to this paragraph

Fast-forward to 2009, and I'm back at work in AggregatorLand, and like it or not, Twitter is where we push links to these days. So now instead of a POST button look what's there in its place. A picture named sidesmiley.gif Permalink to this paragraph

A picture named clip2.jpg Permalink to this paragraph

Now, it is very much more clever than the POST button was back in 2002. Just how much clever -- you'll have to wait to find out, because I'm still working. But when you see my links to test.teamrss.com on Twitter you'll know that I'm testing the new stuff. Murphy-willing it should be released to River2 users tomorrow.  Permalink to this paragraph




 
   Recent stories


A picture named dave.jpgDave Winer, 54, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in Berkeley, California.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

http://twitter.com/davewiner



Dave Winer Mailto icon



© Copyright 1994-2009 Dave Winer Mailto icon.

Last update: 9/21/2009; 8:03:05 PM Pacific. "It's even worse than it appears."

Click here to view blogs commenting on  RSS 2.0 feed.