Rebooting RSS, interlude

  A couple of small items between major posts in the continuing thread about Rebooting RSS.
  1. Ryan Tate, in a comment here, says he doesn't see the efficiency in my proposal to shorten names.
  2. Jon Udell on the idea of rebooting RSS, among other topics.
  A general observation. I would love to have dinner sometime with Jon and Ryan, and let them try to poke holes in my plan to reboot RSS.
  Along the way I might repeat a few times the why of it.
  The why of it: I want to create, out of RSS, something like Twitter, but not locked up on one company's servers. Call me an opensorcerer or a rastafarian, but I like networks that aren't controlled by one company. Esp not a tech company.
  To Ryan's concern. He says he can subscribe to scripting.com now (although I'm not aware of any place you can do that). I want him to be able to follow davewiner, the same way he would on Twitter. But have it resolve to the URL of an RSS feed, invisibly.
  That last part -- invisibly -- is super-important.
  To get there, I need a way to map names to URLs.
  Bill Seitz asks which of my many feeds would map to davewiner?
  Good question. You should come to the dinner too Bill! :-)
  But you don't have to wait to get the answer.
  It would be the same feed I currently send through Twitter.
  As I said in an earlier piece, not in the Rebooting RSS thread: choice and ease of use are inversely related. The more you limit choice, the easier you can make it. I have to pay a price to be part of a simpified network. I already pay that price by being part of Twitter's network. Now I want to renegotiate that. I'm still willing to make a choice, and only have some of my stuff flow through the canonical davewiner feed. But I know that any element in that feed can point to content that would usually be in another feed. I give up some flexibility to be part of a network that's easier to use.