Eye on Winer

Dave Winer recently launched NewsJunk, an RSS-backed aggregator of political news, with Nicco Mele. Mele, the former webmaster for the Howard Dean campaign, says they’ve been developing it for months:

I’ve been working on a new project with Dave Winer — Newsjunk.com. For the last few months, I’ve been annoyed at how hard it is to follow the political coverage. News pops up in a lot of different places, and having single source to follow what’s happening throughout the day has been an itch that needs scratching. Dave remembers the briefing books we had on the Dean campaign, a fixture of many campaigns. So NewsJunk.com started as a way to scratch the itch of the political news junkie, and a way to begin to build an open briefing book.

During the 2000 cycle, I worked as the webmaster and technical director of the Shadow Conventions. That’s actually where I first met Dave, through Edit This Page.com. Then during the 2004 cycle, I worked as the webmaster for Howard Dean. This cycle (2008) after a false start, I’m excited to be working on NewsJunk.

What’s the over/under on how long it takes before this collaboration crashes and burns? As Jason Calacanis will tell any human or puppet who asks, Winer can’t work with people. He’s never mastered the principle “you have to be a friend to have a friend.” Mele, who destroyed his rep among former Deaniacs by backing McCain, is exhibiting some weird judgment here too.

As Mele ponders how much effort to put into their joint venture, perhaps he should consider the significance of the following three facts:

1. Winer owns the domain
2. Winer runs the application on his own server at 70.85.234.142
3. Winer claims all rights to the project: “© 2008 Scripting News, Inc. NewsJunk is a trademark of Scripting News, Inc.”

In a post today about how sites should give users back their data, Dave Winer sings his own praises in this regard, complete with a lame claim for credit:

I’ve always believed that blogging and RSS tools should export their data so users can switch tools and the products at UserLand all did this. As a result, there’s a tradition among RSS readers that they import and export OPML subscription lists. It happened because Radio UserLand, the early market leader, did.

One thing he neglects to mention, which was pointed out several times by McD in comments here: In the entire time that Share Your OPML was running, the site never shared its OPML. Thousands of users shared their OPML subscription lists with Winer’s site, at his urging, and he never reciprocated.

As for the portability of data in Radio LuserLand and Winer’s other software, there’s a reason that Robert Scoble and most other LUserLand bloggers never moved their data when they abandoned the software, leaving years of work and all of their subscribers behind. It’s a giant nightmare to get the data out, because the software’s export capabilities are non-standard, XML support is a messy kludge, and there are character encoding glitches out the ass.

Even Donovan Watts, the author of Radio UserLand: The Missing Manual and the biggest expert on the software, never exported his blog when he switched to WordPress.

Data portability requires more than some cheesy “seal of approval” Winer is thinking about giving out. You have to do the work to fully support the standards that make data portable.

Dave Winer’s latest post borders on self-parody:

Mozilla engineering VP, Mike Schroepfer explained that Microsoft tends to implement technology already approved by the standards working groups, in a different way, and then says their implementation is the standard. Sounds like something Hillary Clinton would do …

This is a nice example of how A-list techbloggers often have Z-list minds when it comes to more intellectually demanding subjects than, say, Flickr-to-Twitter. We’ve been encouraged lately to say more about Winer’s foray into U.S. politics, but the vapidity of the above comment shows why it’s difficult. He’s the kind of political advocate who gives comfort to the other side by living down to their expectations.

In the same post, Winer falsifies the history of RSS:

When Netscape, the company that spawned Mozilla, wanted to implement a format for content syndication in 1999, they did it outside of the W3C because they were sick of the dirty politics bigger companies that felt more significant had been using against them. There was prior art, but they trampled it, because (you guessed) they felt more significant than those that came before.

When Netscape created RSS, the project was led by Dan Libby and Ramanathan Guha. The prior art was the Meta Content Framework and RDF, two formats cocreated by Guha. Winer thinks that his scriptingNews XML format was the prior art for RSS (and thus justifies his retroactive claim to have invented somebody else’s format). ScriptingNews wasn’t implemented outside of Winer’s company when Netscape launched RSS.

Another premise of Winer’s comment is just as dubious. Guha and Netscape were working with the W3C on RDF at the time RSS got started. Winer’s projecting when he claims Netscape was thumbing its nose at the W3C.

Dave Winer constantly pimps for credit in any field he’s touched the last 20 years. His latest complaint is that Wikipedia gives him no props for blogging:

I looked up blogging to find the names of some more obscure ones, the first hit was the Wikipedia page, and out of curiosity I searched the page for my name. It’s not there. All kinds of people get credit for building blogging as a practice and tools for blogging, but apparently, according to Wikipedia, I had nothing to do with it, nor did Scripting News or UserLand

He took this complaint to TechCrunch as well:

By coincidence yesterday I wrote up a long-standing issue I have with Wikipedia, that I don’t get any mention in articles on blogging (and also RSS though I didn’t mention that in yesterday’s piece). I’ve raised it quite a few times, even to the visionary, but since I’m not available for ‘fucking his brains out 24 hours straigHt’, the problem has never been turned over to his internal fix-committee, and people who want to know about blogging or RSS get the idea that other people did the work and took the risks that I did.

As time passes, Winer’s claim to have fathered blogging is being ignored by more writers who cover the subject. Scripting News began eight months before the term weblog was coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997, so Winer’s claim is based on the shaky premise that his site was so distinctively a blog and so popular he should be called the leading originator of the form.

Wikipedia’s approach is eminently reasonable. It puts the coinage of the term weblog in context with a lot of bloglike sites that preceded it, many of which came long before Scripting News. NPR’s Andy Carvin also wrote a history of blogging that didn’t buy Winer’s bullshit.

Dave Winer is not the “blogfather.” He did not invent blogging. The medium was named by others and his role as an early adopter was no bigger than dozens of other writers and developers such as Barger, Peter Merholz, Cameron Barrett, Evan Williams and Ben and Mena Trott.

Winer should reconsider his decision not to sex up Wales, the former porn exec who’s newly unattached. They have a lot in common.

Some readers aren’t clear on why it’s hypocritical as hell for Dave Winer to invent a new HTTP header to lock out other applications from accessing the photo RSS feeds used by FlickrFan. Winer’s fearmongering about FeedBurner should make the point clear. Last year, in one of his efforts to spread FUD against Google’s feed publishing service, Winer wrote:

… if Google ties Feedburner to Google Reader that still hurts people like me, because my feed doesn’t work as well with Google Reader.

Now let’s take a deeper look at “doesn’t work as well.”

It could end up meaning “doesn’t work at all.” It’s quite possible in the second or third iteration that Google drops support for non-Feedburner feeds. It wouldn’t be unprecedented, far from it. Google Blogoscoped has a list of Google products that “prefer” other Google products. I’ve never seen Google not do this when they had the chance. The instant they bought Blogger they tied it to their toolbar. If they had used an open API the toolbar would have worked with all blogging tools. Google just doesn’t think that way, sorry to say.

The ability of one user to opt out would do absolutely nothing to stop or even diminish the negative effects of monopolistic tying. And users show no inclination to do anything for the benefit of the Internet as a whole, so there’s no reason to believe any of them would withhold their support of Feedburner just because it screws with the benefits of a level playing field in the RSS ecosystem. Certainly not enough to persuade Google not to tie the two products.

Several programmers used Winer’s new RSS feeds to display photos without FlickrFan, either because they don’t use Macs or because OPML Editor runs like ass. Those programs don’t work at all now. Winer’s belief in a level playing field in the RSS ecosystem only applies to other people.

Remember that the next time he complains about being locked in a trunk.

In Slate, Paul Boutin explains one of the weaknesses of RSS:

… my RSS reader is only as smart and attentive as I am. It hasn’t figured out that I’ve stopped reading 14 of the 15 Wired.com feeds I subscribed to when I worked there last year. It can’t tell that I only care for about one in 20 of Dave Winer’s nonstop posts, and it has no way of guessing which one that will be.

Boutin, a contributor to ValleyWag, seems to think that a new smart-filtering RSS reader called Persai can handle the herculean task of figuring out which of Winer’s weblog posts is worth a read.

So… today’s “brilliant” new service? You call a phone number, it records your call, and then posts it like a podcast. So, it’s basically voicemail with an RSS feed. Coooooool.

Some problems with the implementation:

1. Easily spoofed.
2. Exposes your phone number to the world.
3. No customization of any kind

Those are all easily fixed, of course, and hopefully they will be. This is actually a pretty neat service, but there’s nothing even border-line revolutionary about it. What I like about it: it’s easy, it requires zero setup, and the sound quality is passable for phone calls.

But, really, this isn’t anything special. In 45 minutes the same could be replicated with a PHP script and a voicemail service that emails MP3 attachments. This will be a decent offering as soon as they implement PINs for the service and hide the phone number.

Dave linked, via Twitter, to a blog post by Marc Canter encouraging us to boycott Google because they had the temerity to… *gasp* …sell their services to those nasty, nasty republicans.

Heh.

It might be the silliest thing I’ve ever read on Canter’s blog. In the next post, blames his mistakes on those nasty, nasty Republicans. I mean, really, if Marc had read as far as the second paragraph he would’ve realized what was going on:

As Official Innovation Provider, Google Inc. will enhance the GOP’s online presence with new applications, search tools, and interactive video. In addition, Google will help generate buzz and excitement in advance of the convention through its proven online marketing techniques.

While I wouldn’t put spinning trivial things past either of the parties (aside: how anyone can see enough difference between them to identify with one and hate the other is beyond me.), this press release sounds like the kind any business would use for the same kind of “event”. It’s not “lying”, it’s some young republican staffer with an MBA putting it to good use.

I wonder if Dave will write a post about how those nasty, nasty Republicans are at it again.

In other news… Dave is going to be announcing a “brilliant” (he says so himself) new use RSS tomorrow. I really hope it’s a contraption I can attach to the hind-quarters of my dog that updates an RSS feed every time he has a bowel movement… following him around the yard is getting kinda old.

As he’s telling Yahoo to sell to Microsoft, Dave Winer sneaks in his favorite advice:

Turn Yahoo into The RSS Powerhouse in every way. Build all new systems around RSS. If it isn’t RSS it doesn’t fly.

Winer frequently asserts that companies can change their fortunes by adopting RSS, and by RSS he means RSS 2.0 and not Atom like those donkey fuckers at Google.

Yahoo went bigger into RSS the past decade than anybody. The company has millions of users subscribing to RSS headlines on My Yahoo, developers remixing RSS on Yahoo Pipes, and millions more reading thousands of RSS feeds produced by its various properties. It also taught RSS to many people through its Publisher’s Guide to RSS, created the popular MediaRSS namespace, joined the RSS Advisory Board and embraced podcasting with the now-dead Yahoo Podcasts portal.

Yahoo already is an RSS powerhouse. Maybe it helped, but embracing RSS clearly wasn’t enough to keep Wall Street happy and avoid its current troubles.

When it comes to thinking about RSS, Winer’s brain is stuck in the Wayback Machine where RSS is an unproven commodity and people are still using XML icons and coffee mugs to subscribe to feeds.

Dave thinks of RSS as one format to rule them all. He wants everyone to use RSS (and not ATOM!) so that everything works together. But is he displaying a new form of hypocrisy with the AP photos feed?

Looking at the comments to a recent post here at EOW you can see that some odd things are afoot.

For starters, a commenter found the AP feed and started using it without FlickrFan. He posted about that here on EOW. Shortly thereafter, the photo feed stopped being updated… but FlickrFan kept getting new pictures. How? Dave changed the address of the feed and rolled out an update silently to FlickrFan clients.

Security through obscurity.

Furthermore, it was noticed that the reason that so many RSS readers were having problems reading this raw feed was due to malformed HTTP URLs, in violation of the RSS spec. Essentially, Dave was using an encrypted URL (albeit a very weak encryption) which required an algorithm (albeit a very simple one) to read the URLs. Some readers did that by default, some did not. In either case, though, the feed was not properly formed RSS (by the spec).

Once that little catch was posted here at EOW, the feed mysteriously changed again. This time with more variations on the “http://” part of the URL… he changed the encryption algorithm.

Is he doing this to make sure that iPhoto can never read his feeds? Is he doing it to break third-party photo-downloaders? Are these just typos?

It’s hard to tell, but one thing is certain: what Dave is putting out is not well-formed RSS. If he’s borking the RSS to break other readers… isn’t that a little hypocritical?