Entries classified under syndication

Dave Winer invites us to get out the secret decoder ring:

Thankfully there hasn't been much format-bashing going on in the last year or so, but it looks like it might be starting again, so let's do something before it becomes a problem.

...

I've been reading a certain mail list, and observing that a certain person is now posting again, after a long hiatus that allowed us to find this relatively peaceful status.

Let's make it clear that we like the way things are now, and won't stand by and say nothing if the level of discourse starts slipping. Thanks for listening.

Eek! That last paragraph reads like some kind of threat, Dave, wtf?

My guess is that the mystery antagonist is Mark Pilgrim and the mailing list is that of the IETF Atom Syntax WG and maybe one of these is what has Dave giving out threats or mandates or whatever?

Well, I for one would love to see Mark back and stirring up the pot in full force. Somewhere deep down inside Dave must feel the same way because it's painfully obvious that he's provoking the exact behavior he is claiming to oppose. Mark is sometimes.. errmm.. harsh/pointed/blunt but he's also right most of the time.

Dave: you don't have a monopoly on being an asshole. Mark does a great job too. We like both of you for the assholes you are.

Mark: piss on Dave, man... Start posting again.

P.S. How's that for Canons of Conduct?

Bill de hÓra's recent piece makes an interesting connection between two waffling technologies - Semantic Web and Web Services:

The case of the DL and ontology world coming to the Semantic Web and worrying over queries that will blow up in the engines is much like the case of the enterprise world coming to the Web worrying over type systems and discovery languages. The likeness is not fleeting - both the Semantic Web and Web Services advocates have been busy building competing technology stacks in the last decade. They have valid points and good technology but the need or demand for such precision in the Web context has been overestimated.

This reminded of an excellent yet rarely cited piece by Cory Doctorow published by O'Reilly in late 2001 entitled The Carpet Baggers Go Home:

The Internet is unpredictable. It's non-goddamned-deterministic.

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The Internet is full of fantastically useful and frustratingly unavailable services, from the elegant simplicty of Weblogs.com's XML-RPC interface that accepts a URL and a link-title and shoves 'em on top of the stack of recently updated sites, to the unaffiliated public CVS servers that pock the Internet like so much acne. They work well enough, on average, and if they were all to fail suddenly and at once, the Internet would kind of suck until they came back online. But there are enough of these little tools, enough ways of finding and manipulating information, that users can interpret unreliability as damage and route around it, finding alternate means of communicating and being communicated at.

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The next generation of Internet entrepreneurs will be people who understand this. They'll be working to provide unreliable services that work in concert with other unreliable services to provide a service that works on average, but not predictably at any given moment. They'll challenge the received wisdom that customers are hothouse flowers, expensive to acquire and prone to wilting at the first sign of trouble. These entrepreneurs will build services that are so compelling that they'll be indispensable, worth using even if the service flakes out when you want it the most.

And Clay Shirky:

Much of the proposed value of the Semantic Web is coming, but it is not coming because of the Semantic Web. The amount of meta-data we generate is increasing dramatically, and it is being exposed for consumption by machines as well as, or instead of, people. But it is being designed a bit at a time, out of self-interest and without regard for global ontology. It is also being adopted piecemeal, and it will bring with it with all the incompatibilities and complexities that implies. There are significant disadvantages to this process relative to the shining vision of the Semantic Web, but the big advantage of this bottom-up design and adoption is that it is actually working now.

And even Richard P. Gabriel:

From 1984 until 1994 I had a Lisp company called "Lucid, Inc." In 1989 it was clear that the Lisp business was not going well, partly because the AI companies were floundering and partly because those AI companies were starting to blame Lisp and its implementations for the failures of AI. One day in Spring 1989, I was sitting out on the Lucid porch with some of the hackers, and someone asked me why I thought people believed C and Unix were better than Lisp. I jokingly answered, "because, well, worse is better." We laughed over it for a while as I tried to make up an argument for why something clearly lousy could be good.