Bruce Zimmer on Dave Winer and RSS

Adam, Andrew, Rogers, Steve, and many others have already weighed in on this topic. On Friday, Dave Winer resigned from the RSS Advisory Board. As with most milestones in life, this is both a happy and sad occasion. Dave Winer gave us weblogs, RSS for simple web content syndication, several outliners, Scripting News, Frontier, Manila, Radio UserLand, and ... well, you get the picture. Dave is no slacker in the creating and giving departments. Is he perceived as a sweet old teddy bear? No. Is he strong-willed and opinionated? Yes. Does he have a right to be? You bet. Dave was, and still is, a pioneer. Pioneers accumulate arrows in the back. When a pioneer walks away, it is a sad day. "the good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one"

On a happy note, RSS is strong enough to stand alone. Those who criticized it as "Dave's standard" have now lost a big arrow. As painful as I know it was, Dave did the right thing and set RSS free. Now we'll see if his critics can show any of the "right stuff." 

I have never met, spoken to, or corresponded with Dave Winer. He has certainly never heard of me and will likely never see this post. I'm just an old fart expressing my opinion and my gratitude.

Thank you, Dave, for everything.

 

---

Rogers Cadenhead on Dave Winer and RSS

Thanks for the Creative Chaos. Dave Winer announced Friday that he is leaving the RSS Advisory Board on July 1.

By happenstance yesterday, a Google search brought me to Dave's five-year-old mailing list post on XML-DEV introducing RSS:

RSS is an XML-based format that represents what we in the Frontier community call a "weblog". It's frequently updated site that points to stories on and off-site, that identifies an audience and feeds links to them. Until RSS came along the only format people were using was HTML. RSS changed that.

At the time Dave made this post, the concept of weblogs was so new you had to explain it, even to the plugged-in crowd reading XML-DEV. RSS was an obscure format that a handful of Web publishers adopted so they could appear on Netscape.Com. There were only two RSS aggregators in the world -- the one on Netscape and the brand-new My.UserLand.Com. Jeff Barr developed Carmen's Headline Viewer, the first desktop aggregator, in direct response to Dave's announcement.

Without Dave, RSS probably would have died when Netscape abandoned its customized news portal and took the RSS specification offline.

The issue of whether Dave co-created RSS is a can of worms, but even if you don't share my belief that he did, he deserves the most credit for making that distinction matter. (No one argues about who invented CDF.)

Dave recognized five years ago that RSS would be a competitor to HTML. Then he made that crazy notion real, tirelessly evangelizing the concept of simple XML-based publishing in both word and code.

I was asked last night by a reporter whether Dave's resignation would shift the focus of syndication "away from personalities." Perhaps it will, and there will undoubtedly be people who view that as a welcome change.

Who knows in what perverted ways this content will flow around the net? I'm totally looking forward to the creative chaos that's coming!

Five years after Dave predicted "creative chaos," 125,000 syndication feeds are consumed around the clock by an audience that may surpass one million. RSS has become so important to the Internet that dozens of talented developers have worked for more than a year on an attempt to beat it.

I hope that people on all sides of the syndication debate recognize the role that one personality played in bringing us to this point and share their thanks with the world.

Using RSS. [Workbench]

 

---

Andrew Grumet on Dave Winer and RSS

Dave, thank you for RSS.

Yesterday Dave announced his resignation from the RSS advisory board. I'm sorry to see Dave go, but think his rationale is spot-on and am excited about the upcoming open source release of Frontier and the possibilities it opens. I like Steve Gillmor's graduation day metaphor. Awesome.

The title of this post is something that IMO doesn't get said enough. I don't think syndication got to where it is today by accident. I think it took a lot of hard work. The technology had to be developed, promoted, used. Specs had to be written and competitors allowed to enter the market, so that there could be a market. Data formats had to coalesce so that the little guys could compete on features instead of on compatibility.

At the least I think we can say that Dave's played a large role in making syndication happen. I've actually said this to Dave in person: "Dave, thank you for RSS". That's how much enjoyment I get out of writing applications for this space.

[Andrew Grumet's Weblog]

 

---

Adam Curry on Dave Winer and RSS

ReSSignation. Dave decided to step down from the RSS Advisory Board, leaving 3 members; Andrew, Rogers and me.

I haven't spoken to the other board members about this yet, but I presume they will want to continue, as do I. We're getting very close to some big breakthroughs in aggregator land that I find quite exciting.

[Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

 

---

Using JavaScript For Web Syndication
RSS and analytics tips via Chris Pirillo:

Using JavaScript For Web Syndication. “If you are syndicating to websites that are not under your control, you don’t know that the webmaster will have the expertise to implement a syndication strategy using XML. You might be syndicating to a small company that used FrontPage to make the website; they certainly can’t set up a dynamic process to fetch an XML feed from your site, cache it, and integrate the data into their site.” By chris@pirillo.com (Chris Pirillo). [Lockergnome's RSS & Atom Tips]

 

---

Counting Web Site Visitors
More goodies from Phil Windley:

Counting Web Site Visitors. If your organization runs a Web site, you may think that the statistics you're getting from your log analysis software are presenting a pretty accurate picture of your site's traffic. Well, not so fast. A newspaper research and consulting firm named Belden Associates did a study that shows most site traffic numbers are way off base for a variety of reasons. For example, Belden estimates that half of the daily users of a newspaper website access it from more than one computer, resulting a lot of double counting. I couldn't find the report on the Belden site, but a write-up in the Christian Science Monitor gives some details. Even though the study was done for the newspaper industry, most of what's reported is not specific to newspaper Web sites. [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog]

 

---

Things I Should Implement

Stuff found via Seb's Open Research:

• Fagan Finder search box
• Micah Alpern search box
• Music experiment reported by Nancy White as mentioned by Seb

 

---

Definition of Copyright

Devil's Dictionary on Copyright. The new edition of The Devil's Dictionary has many swell corkers, but I'm quite partial to this one:

copyright, noun

The notion that you can protect from the future what you stole from the past.

Link (Thanks, Jason!) [Boing Boing Blog]

 

---

Amy Gahran - Do Webfeeds Help or Hurt Site Traffic

Do Webfeeds Help or Hurt Site Traffic?. On June 3, Dave Winer (a key creator of the RSS technical standard wrote an article answering this question: Would a big media company lose traffic if they supported RSS?

This piece a good, timely complement to my June 4 article, How Many People Read Your Webfeed?

Winer's main point, with which I heartily agree, is this: "I don't think that providing [webeeds], if you do it right, lowers traffic, in fact I think you can gain traffic."

I both agree and disagree with Winer's other points...

(Full story, with links to Winer's article and other resources...)

[Contentious Weblog]

 

---

Amy Gahran - How Many People Read Your Webfeed?

How Many People Read Your Webfeed?. From the perspective of many online publishers, webfeeds (whether RSS or Atom format) have one big shortcoming: In most cases, it's difficult or impossible to know how many people subscribe to your webfeed.

Circulation numbers have always been the cornerstone of the publishing world, and that hasn't changed in the online age. This is especially true if a site's business model hinges at all on advertising, or on leveraging relationships with readers to sell other products or services, or to promote a particular organization or issue. For those sites, offering a webfeed feels a bit dangerous – they don't necessarily fear losing readers, but rather losing track of how many readers they have.

Webfeed metrics is a complex issue that mainly boils down to technology. Most content and publishing people aren't technical specialists. However, this is one technical area that online publishers probably should understand (on at least a basic level) and follow major developments.

Here are a few good resources to get you started...

[Contentious Weblog]

 

---

Andry Fragen exportWeblog Tool

Export Posts to Text.

I've been tinkering with blosxom lately and I needed a way to extract all my posts from the weblogData.root. What I came up with was the exportWeblog tool.

I tried to make it a bit more universal. It should make a great alternate backup strategy as well. Everything's pretty straight forward. If there are any questions let me know. I'll be unavailable for the next several weeks starting 8/13. I'll try to answer any questions I can before then, and I'll certainly get to the rest when I return.

[Surgical Diversions]

 

---

Steve Hooker Script to Fix Blank Archives

Re: Radio crashes after start-up. Hi Lillia,

My script will fix blank archives:

http://www.cybersaps.org/gems/weblogData.root.fixingBlankArchives.ftsc

I would have thought merely deleting said categories from the www local folder, be they folders and/or files, would delete them from the server? That's what's supposed to happen.

Steve Hooker
http://www.cybersaps.org/ [Radio UserLand Messages]

 

---

RSS Parsing Reference et al
Goodies from the Cadenhead Workbench

Wanted: Gluttonous RSS Feeders. Using MySQL and PHP, I'm cobbling together a server-based RSS aggregator/publisher that makes it insanely fast to skim feeds, choosing items for publication without much descriptive text or editing. The code makes use of two terrific open source PHP projects: the Magpie RSS and Atom parser and Edd Dumbill's XML-RPC for PHP.

Erik Thauvin uses this approach on Linkblog, checking a mind-boggling 1,600 feeds for technology and programming links and choosing the best 15-20 items each day. His site has quickly become a favorite.

Although I'm not going to adopt this format on Workbench -- I write like someone who gets paid by the word -- when you read Thauvin's description of his editing process, it becomes clear that he's practicing a specialized form of weblogging that could benefit from its own tools.

As I explain this concept to people, I've dubbed this kind of site a passalong, because the point is to scan lots of syndicated feeds and pass along the best links quickly.

For the most part, existing weblogging software is designed under the assumption that users write about everything they link. Radio UserLand can route individual items from the aggregator to an editor, but this wasn't simple enough for the process I have in mind:

1. Scan a headlines page, selecting items that sound interesting. Click Submit to put them all on a queue.
2. Skim the queue, which adds item descriptions, and visit links. Select items that should be dropped from the queue, then click Submit to dump them.
3. Publish the queue once an hour (in my case, using the MetaWeblog and Movable Type APIs to send items over XML-RPC to a Movable Type weblog).

The software needs a lot of work -- there's no editor yet, and I want a Bayesian filter that can guess which new headlines I'm most likely to read -- but I'm jazzed about the potential.

With thousands of information sources producing RSS and Atom feeds, we need people like Thauvin who have integrated weblogging into their daily news-gathering routine. Weblog links are like ant trails -- a lot of people have to link to something good in order to get noticed.

Though my original plan was to design this for personal use, if there's interest, I'll add user account support and make the code available for beta testing. Pass it along. [Workbench]

 

---