Eye on Winer

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.

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.