Eye on Winer

Dave Winer hates FeedBurner, the feed publishing and stat tracking service bought by Google last year for $100 million, as he showed in this recent mopey Twitter update:

i’ll get flamed for this, but that’s how i felt about feedburner. never even said hello, much less thanks.

Because he hates FeedBurner, Winer linked to a weblog post yesterday accusing the service of playing favorites to benefit Google Reader over the competition. The charge was bogus and quickly refuted.

This is just the latest example of Winer spreading disingenuous bullshit, FUD and outright paranoia about the company.

Why he expects to be thanked for this remains a mystery.

As one might expect, Dave’s new software set off something of a storm of complaints form photographers who a) don’t understand the technology and/or b) don’t understand the law.

Here’s pretty much the bottom line: when you post something — anything — publicly on the web you’re basically giving the world the freedom to take a copy of it for their own personal use and enjoyment. Not to sell, not to display publicly, not to give away, but for personal, private use.

Lane Hartwell says, in a comment:

if I have my images marked ALL RIGHTS RESERVED I mean just that…no reproduction in any form without my consent.

Unfortunately for her, that’s not really how it works. In fact, it really can’t work that way. It’s impossible for Computer B to display an image that’s stored on Computer A without reproduction. Does Lane really expect everyone who loads up Flickr to pick up the phone and call her before their browser makes a cache copy?

Besides, isn’t the real problem here that Flickr is transmitting the URLs of JPGs that are supposed to be marked “all rights reserved”?

After all, when Dave says: “When you publish an RSS feed with enclosures you’re inviting people to download your content and store it locally.” He’s absolutely right — that’s the whole point of RSS enclosures.

Arguing that downloading things from RSS enclosures is copyright infringement is like putting all of your valuables in a vending machine and then trying to press charges against the people who use it for “theft”.

Then again…

When Dave’s website was being marked up by Google’s Toolbar he didn’t like it, but it was basically the same thing as FlickrFan is doing (although far more innocuous). If we’re very, very generous to FlickrFan, we can say that the software is remixing Flickr so that we can view it our own way, which is what Google Toolbar did when it added links to pages at our request.

The contrast is that in the first scenario it was Dave’s site being remixed and here Dave is the remixer. In Dave’s world, that makes all the difference.

Dave Winer posted the following entry today on Scripting News before sending it down the memory hole:

Did I invent photocasting and catching?

Well, no I didn’t. And you can quote me on that.

There are quite a few apps that run on desktops that read RSS feeds with either picture enclosures or media-rss enclosures. They all seem to coordinate with, or are screen savers. (FlickrFan falls into the first category, it’s not a screen saver, and people who say it is are wrong.)

But I’ll tell you this, mark my words, I will make this a big deal, I will get major content companies on board, and I will spawn competition, and invigorate the existing products, and when it’s done, a lot more pictures will be flowing to a lot more living rooms, laptops and desktops because of the work I am doing.

I wasn’t the first podcaster either, I think that honor goes to Steve Gillmor and Chris Lydon. But when I started podcasting in the summer of 2004, a lot more people saw that they could do it because I showed them how, I made it my business to demystify it, and because I’m so obviously an amateur (if he can do it so can I).

And, as with podcasting, the technology for this stuff was my creation.

The post was republished by Planet PGC before deletion.

Long bet: Two weeks from today, even Scoble won’t be talking about this application.

Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote up Flickrfan, Dave Winer’s new half-assed TV screensaver, on Read/Write Web:

Chronic inventor Dave Winer has released an early version of his new Mac software flickrfan tonight. …

Instead of being grateful for the publicity, Winer had a cow over the term “chronic.”

Winer: “… I’m a veteran developer (a term I prefer to “chronic” — what exactly does that mean?)”

Winer (one hour later): “… And please don’t use the word chronic — that’s a word that’s used for sickness. It’s a bit of s curse man. Not very nice, and not likely to work too well for you if you recall that what goes around comes around. I thought we had a cordial relationship. :-)”

Kirkpatrick changed “chronic” to “long-time,” an entirely unnecessary capitulation to a completely ridiculous complaint. Two months ago Winer declared the word hate off-limits because his relatives fled the Nazis. Now the word chronic’s out of bounds because it makes him feel frail and vulnerable.

Am I still allowed to use the word assclown?

Dave’s compilation of the New York Times keyword data is really neat. It needs a whole heap of UI work, but the concept is excellent.

I’d prefer to see a logarithmic, live compilation but this is a good start — I just wonder why there’s no OPML output.

The Small Picture:

Why is it that the highest-rated sites, some with supposedly hundreds of thousands of subscribers, only generate a couple hundred hits when they link to you? As Pete Cashmore on Mashable says, it’s because the subscriber numbers don’t reflect actual readership.

Mr. Cashmore’s analysis is interesting but, essentially, more melodrama than anything useful. There are two interesting things about Dave’s post, though. The first is that he continually ignores another possible reason why a link doesn’t get many click-throughs: reader interest. I read a lot of feeds. I click the links contained in them barely 10% of the time. Back when I only read a few sites, I clicked on a much higher percentage. Now, because I have so many feeds, it takes a lot more to pique my interest.

The most interesting thing here, though, is that Mr. Cashmore’s post critiques something GoogleReader has called a “feed bundle”. What is a “feed bundle”, you ask? It’s much like the “reading list” that Dave proposed a few months back. You subscribe to the bundle, Google decides what feeds that includes.

Truth be told, I’m not sure if the larger issue Dave is talking about is even solvable. It sounds like he wants to find the “good” blogs faster, and with less work. It’s already as easy as it’s ever been. Load your feed reader up with a bunch of like-minded people, read their posts (and the pages they link to), and use your brain.

How much easier does it need to be?

Dave Winer today:

Ask anyone who’s worked on a RSS reader, for that matter, ask anyone who’s used one, what a PITA it is to subscribe to a feed. All those little buttons, or copying and pasting, and looking at urls, and trying to figure out whether you want this format or that format. It’s a miracle anyone actually subscribes to feeds it’s so damned complicated.

What the hell? Has Winer subscribed to an RSS feed in the last two years? Once the major browser developers adopted a feed icon over his idiotic objection, subscribing to a feed became simple. Click the icon to open a page; see a preview; decide whether to subscribe. In Firefox it takes two clicks and supports any web RSS aggregator or desktop client.

The only reason it’s a pain in the ass for Winer is because he’s using his own software.

On Wednesday, Dave penned an odd little essay on RSS vs. ATOM. His thesis is that users should never see the debate between RSS and ATOM. Why, you ask? Because right now “RSS” is the de facto name for all of the syndication formats, and it clearly helps Dave’s ego if nobody ever suggests that we start calling things what they are. Further, it’s no far stretch to believe that if we quit talking about, and debating, syndication formats, we could find ourselves locked into one format blindly.

Dave wants to hide all references to ATOM from the users because they “don’t care.” I agree, wholeheartedly, that users don’t care. Right now they only care that it works. But is that how we want it to be?

(more…)

This post is a reader-submission from an EoW friend that we’ll call “Tom”

Remember Ted…

Dear Ted

Your geeks are taking both of us for a ride.

I was subscribing to your feed, generally reading all your updates, and now I see the feed moved.

I was going to post a note saying that it would be better if you redirected to the new feed, but then I saw that your new feed isn’t RSS, to which I ask – why??

Do you want to lose subscribers?

Because that’s what happened. I can’t read your feed anymore Ted. I’ll survive, but I will miss your posts.

So it’s odd that today, a mere 7 months later, Dave is suddenly the bastion of syndication fairness…

Edit all docs and specs accordingly. Everywhere it says “Atom is better” remember “Users don’t care.”

Facebook is doing the same thing, and I’m pulling back from endorsing them until they take the religion out of their docs. I won’t help propogate the myth that one format is better than the other. Users don’t care.

If you must answer the question “What’s the difference between RSS and Atom?” just say they’re different flavors of the same thing. Even better would be to find a way to avoid raising the question at all. Test your reader against all formats with significant installed bases, and do what you can to keep the number of formats to a minimum.

What makes this even more amusing is that the issue here isn’t Facebook supporting RSS over Atom but simply that they mention Atom in their documentation. Apparently in Dave’s world it is now a sin to even mention Atom without also paying tribute to RSS.

(I should point out that in every official Facebook document I was able to find the company was careful to use “Atom/RSS” but something had to set Dave off)

EyeOnWiner adds: isn’t it curious that Dave’s argument against mentioning ATOM is that “users don’t care” but as soon as someone actually starts using ATOM, the users do care. Specifically, Dave cares. He ignores the possibility that some users feel the same way about ATOM that he does about RSS.

Today, Dave points to a post that carries his water for him. Why does Firefox hate Dave RSS America?

He also asks about user-generated-content. Specifically, who “owns” Netflix ratings. The answer, of course, is both Netflix and the user own them. He says “[users] should be able to take it where they want.”

Fact is, they can. As is evidenced by the fact that Dave has his ratings in two places. Is there an easy way? No. But I don’t think the users are entitled to an easy way. If you don’t like the fact that a certain service won’t let you export your data, keep track of it somewhere else. Supply, demand, etc.

Easy.