Eye on Winer

Catch it before he edits it out. Dave Winer admitted today in a blog post that he didn’t invent RSS:

… we pulled a fast one on Netscape in 1999 by throwing in the towel on our syndication format and using theirs instead.

For years, Winer has puffed himself up with the claim that he’s the coinventor of RSS, and a lot of bloggers and journalists bought it. His claim is based on the false premise that because Netscape incorporated some of his suggestions in RSS, he invented it with them. By the same logic, the guy who introduced the BLINK tag invented HTML. You can’t invent something that existed before you got involved in it. You can popularize it, as he did, but it’s bullshit to call yourself its coinventor.

Dave Winer did not invent RSS. The format was created in 1999 by Ramanathan V. Guha and Dan Libby at Netscape. Winer invented ScriptingNews format, an early stab at syndication that died when he switched to RSS.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 14th, 2009 at 9:24 am and is filed under Dave. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.