Burning over FeedBurner
When I first started reading about this, I thought I stumbled over an old thread from years ago. But this is all new. Apparently, Dave is upset about FeedBurner and Google.
So now someone at Google “owns” Feedburner and all their feeds. And they could, if they wanted to, change the feeds to another format, overnight, without asking anyone. – Dave Winer
Robert is as well.
But, what really is cooking here is that RSS has been moved to big companies to control. How so? Well, the RSS Advisory board, which includes members from Cisco, Yahoo, Netscape, FeedBurner (er, Google), Microsoft, and Bloglines and this new unofficial board is changing the RSS spec all the time (they are now up to version 2.0.9. UPDATE: which only represents a couple of changes, according to comments left on this post). – Robert Scoble
Sam makes a point.
Oh, and as to the recent spec “clarification” that was recently made to the alternate specification that also happens to call itself RSS 2.0? FeedBurner’s CTO voted against it. – Sam Ruby
For myself, I would simply point out that Jenny Levine works for something other than a big company.
Other than something to laugh about, RSS politics have gotten really old to me. Especially when there is a better alternative.
Gorman on Web 2.0
The life of the mind in the age of Web 2.0 suffers, in many ways, from an increase in credulity and an associated flight from expertise. Bloggers are called “citizen journalists”; alternatives to Western medicine are increasingly popular, though we can thank our stars there is no discernable “citizen surgeon” movement; millions of Americans are believers in Biblical inerrancy—the belief that every word in the Bible is both true and the literal word of God, something that, among other things, pits faith against carbon dating; and, scientific truths on such matters as medical research, accepted by all mainstream scientists, are rejected by substantial numbers of citizens and many in politics. – Michael Gorman
My favorite conversation last year at Gnomedex was when one of the side discussions got into defining what was and was not Web 2.0. No one had a definition and everyone had agreed it was pretty just a marketing slogan. I think I got the biggest laugh when I said, “When I think of Web 2.0, I think of rounded corners.” So I might have to disagree with David…
So… how are those two topics about web 2.0, you ask? Beats me. He DID mention the Internet and Sergey Brin of Google… but he didn’t actually write ANYTHING about web 2.0. Not one jot or tittle. Nada. Nothing. – David Lee King
While I didn’t really see anything particularly Web 2.0-ish in his posts, who can say what is and isn’t? But seriously…
Wikipedia is the best known example of improved findability of knowledge. Gorman is correct that an encyclopedia is not the product of a collective mind; this is as true of Wikipedia as of Britannica. Gorman’s unfamiliarity and even distaste for Wikipedia leads him to mistake the dumbest utterances of its most credulous observers for an authentic accounting of its mechanisms; people pushing arguments about digital collectivism, pro or con, known nothing about how Wikipedia actually works. Wikipedia is the product not of collectivism but of unending argumentation; the corpus grows not from harmonious thought but from constant scrutiny and emendation. – Clay Shirky
I was just looking for the origin of the quote about “owning the press” when I found this essay.
The writer A. J. Liebling, who wrote about freedom of the press, put it this way, “The person who has freedom of the press is the person who owns one.” Owning a press gives you a lot more freedom of speech than having to write a letter to your local newspaper, hoping the editor publishes it. It takes more and more money to own a newspaper, and even if you owned one, it is harder and harder to prevent it being taken over by some giant corporation. At the end of World War II, more than 80 percent of the daily newspapers in the United States were independently owned. Forty years later only 28 percent were independent, the rest owned by outside corporations. And fifteen huge corporations controlled half of the nation’s newspaper business. – Howard Zinn
More than anything else, Web 2.0 is about making what A. J. Liebling said untrue. There are a great deal of entrenched interests who don’t want to see that happen and Michael Gorman is one of their spokespersons. Personally, I think they need him more than we do.
Content to the People
Does it matter how people should happen to arrive at your webpage?
Articles are emailed around, copied to blogs for commentary, grouped together with stories on the same subject from rival publications, and found by search engines and aggregator services. I have no idea how you’re reading this column. Maybe you found it on the Online Journal’s home page or the technology page. Maybe you saw it because it includes Google’s stock symbol, or it hit your newsreader via an RSS feed. Maybe you followed a link from a blog, Google News or Technorati. Maybe someone emailed it to you. Maybe you printed it out this morning and are reading it now. (However you found it, thank you!) – Jason Fry
It is nice to see that some people in old media understand what is going on. For the record, I found it via Bloglines on Techmeme.
Control of Your Space
When you create your presence on the web, how much control are you willing to give up?
When you host your stuff on a Web site that’s free and that you don’t control some nasty crap can happen. Yesterday MySpace started blocking Photobucket stuff. My blog is hosted on Wordpress.com and I have the same issues the MySpace folks are seeing (the free service where my blog is hosted right now, which is different from the software that you host on your own servers). The thing is when a company is hosting your stuff for free they need to see some way to make money off of the service. This isn’t going to be free with no ads forever and ever. And, it certainly would piss me off if I worked on Wordpress.com if someone came along and made money from my user’s photos and videos. – Robert Scoble
Of course, I have always considered Robert something of a special case before he always has made use of hosted services. He has never really had full control of his web presence. Personally, I like having full control over my domains.
That being said, I have enjoyed playing with Twitter of late. And after having sort of stumbled on the concept of a lifestream, I have created them at Ziki, iStalkr (through Steven), Tumblr (through Alex), and the phenomenon of last weekend, Jaiku. It will be interesting to see where this goes.
Machine tags
I hadn’t heard of Machine tags before, but it is an interesting concept in this era of folksonomies.
The ability for anyone to create a namespace opens up an interesting future as we begin to see patterns and conventions emerge: amazon:asin=B000AA4I1M anyone? Which brings me to the point of this post. This time last year I was tagging photos and posts which discussed books in the following manner isbn=0713998393. In and of itself this works fine, but it is not a valid machine tag, which means we cannot make use of the afore-mentioned API goodness within Flickr (and where Flickr is leading so others will follow). We therefore need a triple-tag version of the ISBN tag, and here’s my suggestion: iso:isbn=0713998393. ISBN is a standard recognised by the International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) so I thought it made a certain sense for ISO to be the namespace. Other standardised entities could be tagged in a similar way, such as iso:issn=15340295. – Richard Rutter
It sounds like something perhaps some Librarians should be involved in.
