Thu, 21 Dec 2006 23:03:39 GMT
I had lunch with Marc Canter yesterday, and he told me about a conversation he had with Tim O’Reilly and Cory Doctorow, where they told him they knew I had nothing to do with RSS. I asked how they said they knew. They had apparently asked some people at Netscape and they said they didn’t work with me. As if that was how RSS came to be the powerhouse it is today. It isn’t. Eventually Tim came around, and gave me credit for making RSS happen. Thanks.
The process whereby RSS came to be so powerful was one of building out both ends of the technology, supply and demand, and putting some currency on the network, and hoping it boots up. In the case of RSS as a transport for blog posts and news articles, it did, and the two pieces were Radio UserLand’s blogging tool, Radio UserLand’s aggregator, and a few early blogs, including Scripting News (the currency). It also worked in a similar manner, eventually, for podcasting.
Today I received a link to a patent granted to Microsoft, where they claim to have invented all this stuff. Presumably they’re eventually going to charge us to use it. This should be denounced by everyone who has contributed anything to the success of RSS.
