This may be a bad attitude to take, but I plan on supporting whatever formats and syntaxes that are readable/parseable/displayable in the RSS aggreagators that I care about most (eg, NetNewsWire, FeedReader).

Sure, some folks may want to grab the feed and use it in other ways, and there's no stopping me from making multiple feeds in diff formats. So it's likely that I will be able to make my five readers happy when they want the feed made available in other ways.

Knowing what those formats are and getting MT templates to create those feeds will be the things I'll be looking for in the next few weeks/months/years. I'm staying as far away from the debate as I can (because it smacks of a usenet thread).

Right on the mark Dan. The ease with which tools can create these different formats makes it trivial to support new ones. Winer seems to be hell bent on making people think RSS is the end-all-be-all format and that he's the only one capable of guiding the effort. RSS is great, wonderful for lots of stuff. There are other things possible that arguably fall well outside the scope of what RSS and Winer's thinking can possibly hope to support. Thus the Echo community effort toward having discussions on a new format. Real discussions, with real debate and genuine respect for multiple viewpoints. The great thing is teams like MT and Blogger are very interested in taking the cooperative approach. If Dave wants to flail along like some Don Quixote he's more than welcome to it. The users, however, will doubtlessly follow the efforts of those that give them what they want. MT and Blogger have an excellent track record of doing just that.

You bet they are!
And if they aren't, why not go to full-fledged RDF? Why invent another format, pushed by a wiki, of all things!

I wrote a semi-rant this morning, saying many of the same things. Just remember Dave's side of things, too. He's a person, like the rest of us, that has worked hard for years on something he believes in. Others come along and want to reinvent the wheel, so he says "Why not just make better wheels? I've already figured out they are round!" He also pouts a little since no one asked him to help. Everyone labels Dave as a "control freak" and doesn't say anything nice about him any more.

Take the personalities out of it. Think about the business community's perception: I just dropped money on blogging tool X and now a bunch of other folks want to "officially" rewrite the spec. What happens to the money I spent? What happens to the jobs I created? Can the developer that I bought the software from turn around new tools quickly so my feeds are compliant? Can I afford to pay the developer's fees for the upgrade?

Most of all: Why in the hell do the upgrade anyway? 7 different versions of RSS say so, but here's a cheaper way: Pick one and say *it's* official. No wheel inventing needed. Pick up a can of polish and a rag and make *that* RSS the best one ever.

Steve

The explanation I have heard the most is that Dave dropped the ball on updating the RSS 2.0 spec after repeated requests to do so. Developers wanted to extend RSS 2.0 but Dave was acting like he washed his hands of it - or perhaps he was just too busy at his university gig or focused on any one of the million other things he always has his eyes on. If this is (was?) the case then Dave should have given up control of the RSS 2.0 spec to someone who can lead further development but because his personality will never let that happen, a group of people decided to simply route around him.

Take the personalities out of it? Now there's a feat even King Solomon would have trouble managing. The truth of the matter is Dave has, time and again, half implemented a series of hacks in Radio/Frontier and then spent enormous energies fighting against any attempts to fix them and move forward. All the while accusing everyone else of being the problem. The flip-flopping, half-assed code and general abuse Dave dishes out have lead the various developers to conclude they interested in moving the ideas forward. There's a limited amount of energy to expend. They're saying, with this new effort, that they're sick of seeing it wasted because of Winer.

As for 'what this will mean to the market', it won't mean anything different than RSS has meant thus far. There's certainly no desire to see anything making use of RSS stop doing so. There's of course hope that ideas implemented in Echo will provide a welcome set of concepts for forward moving products to utilize.

What'da'ya'know! A post by Bill knocking Dave. Yawn!

In the meantime, there are perfectly valid syndication formats like RSS 0.9 and RSS 2.0 that work perfectly well and can be safely used to build prototype tools and collaborative web sites.

So what's wrong with RSS 1.0?