Dave Winer orchestrated a move in which the company he founded, Userland, has turned over ownership of the RSS specification to Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
What a tremendously smart move on Winer’s part.
Update (5:50pm, same day): I’ve read one or two sites (sorry, didn’t save the links, I’ll try to find them later) that have suggested that this is some kind of death knell or hiccup (because the hiccups are basicall small death knells) for Echo/Necho/Atom/Pie/InsertNameHere People who think Echo/Atom/Etc. is a replacement for RSS just haven’t gotten up to speed on the issue. It’s syndication + archiving + publishing API all rolled into one; there’s some overlap with RSS, but the move of RSS from Userland to Harvard really doesn’t have any impact on the value of Echo/Atom/Whatchamacallit.
They really need to settle the name issue quickly, though. Sheesh. Note to self: if you ever launch a high profile technology project, name it first. Else everyone has a hassle trying to talk about it.
Syndication & Aggregation
Moral relativism is the last bastion of sociopaths and freshmen.
Other
I’ve watched the recent controversy over depublishing with great interest. I’ve participated, far more vigorously than I normally do, in discussion threads on several (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) weblogs over this issue.
Someone asked me why this was so important to me. Although my paycheck isn’t explicitly because of my writing skills these days, at times in the past 15 years I’ve been paid for writing or editing newspaper articles, magazine features, fiction, public relations materials, advertising copy, technical manuals, etc., as well as having taught writing at several universities. I consider myself a writer. I consider writing an important activity that has the potential for immense impact. Someone who engages in writing, particularly someone whose words reach a wide audience, should hold themselves accountable for what he or she writes. If not, I believe it is justifiable for her community to hold her accountable for their writing practice. In the end, isn’t that one of the roles of society — to hold accountable those individuals who refuse to hold themselves accountable?
With my own accountability in mind, I have put together a first version of an editorial policy for this weblog. Comments and feedback on this draft of the editorial policy are welcome.
Read more…
Weblogs
From the Washington Post: Low-Budget Reality, On Sale Everywhere
On the streets of DC, there’s apparently an emerging business around low-budget “reality” DVDs. Enterpreneurs with digital video cameras, a computer, and a DVD burner are making a business out of video recordings of everything from go-go shows to street fights to video collections of women’s posterior parts captured at outdoor festivals.
Move over, Mark Burnett.
Technology & Internet
Rebecca Blood: Weblog Ethics, excerpted from her book The Weblog Handbook.
A summary:
1. Publish as fact only that which you believe to be true.
2. If material exists online, link to it when you reference it.
3. Publicly correct any misinformation.
4. Write each entry as if it could not be changed; add to, but do not rewrite or delete, any entry.
5. Disclose any conflict of interest.
6. Note questionable and biased sources.
Bravo! Number four is particularly pertinent to the recent brouhaha. Number six as well. ;-)
Weblogs
Overnight, I thought about the post I made yesterday regarding de-publishing. I’m working up an editorial policy to make it clear to my readers (both of you!) what is subject to change, what is not, and to be able to represent that changes have take place through representation of posted vs. modified dates.
One of the few frustrations I have with Movable Type is that MTEntryDate is always the date of the creation of the entry (e.g. when you clicked on “New Entry”) and not the posting date. I frequently create a post and use Movable Type’s draft mode to save it while I work on it. Sometimes, I might not post it for a day or two. If I don’t remember to manually change the entry date, I wind up “posting to the past” because the date defaults to date of creation, not date of posting.
What I would like is, for each entry, to be able to automatically indicate the time and date of creation, the time and date of posting, and the time and date of the last update.
The LastModified MT plug-in gets me that last part. I haven’t been able to find the appropriate combination of MT tags or plug-ins that will allow me to automatically distinguish the “created on” date from the time of posting.
Thoughts? Solutions?
Movable Type, Weblogs
Mark Pilgrim has instituted an interesting site, called Winer Watcher. It uses Dave Winer’s RSS feed to track the frequent changes, additions, and deletions Winer makes to his Scripting News weblog. I noticed this recently, because there’s a particularly inflammatory post about Tim Bray in my Scripting News RSS feed that has been edited out of existence on the actual weblog.
Of course, this is nothing new. I’ve been irked with Winer’s “editorial policy” (or lack thereof) before and wrote extensively about it’s failures in this thread in Paolo Valdemarin’s weblog. The short version is: I believe ethics and accountability demand that if you make substantive changes or corrections to published comments, that those changes and corrections be publicly acknowledged.
Winer’s standard disclaimer is that he “edits in public” and his “publication time is 10pm.” I think that’s a cop out. On a weblog, when something is posted, it is public. Ergo, the time of posting is the time of publication; the words are present, distributed, and have impact. Winer frequently writes inflammatory posts, then removes the inflammatory parts or deletes the entire post. He attempts to make it appear as if the inflammatory words never existed. This isn’t editing; this is de-publishing. (In earlier posts I refered to this as “un-publishing,” but I’ll use “de-publishing” now. The term “unpublished” has the existing meaning of “not yet published”.)
De-publishing is a mechanism only available to online writers who control their own publication medium (e.g. bloggers). In print, radio, or TV, once you’ve made your content public, you can’t pull it back. Yesterday’s print edition of the Washington Post is out there; no way to de-publish it.
Even online, you can only de-publish your words, if you (the author) are also the publisher. E.g. a reporter for a newspaper that publishes articles online probably can’t pull their words offline without going through the editorial process. An editor is supposed to be a check against failure of journalist ethics (although from the recent New York Times debacle, we know that’s not a perfect system). Only an online author that is also their own online publisher can de-publish.
As Mark has made evident, though, RSS feeds frequently leave a virtual paper trail of the changes.So, bravo to Mark Pilgrim for exposing this practice for what it is. I only wish Mark had been doing it longer, so we had a more complete archive of Winer’s de-published comments.
Weblogs
Shelley Powers comments on AOL’s plan to launch a weblogging tool:
I remember AOL and Usenet and all those naive users dumped on to the Usenet groups, coming close to all but destroying some of them. Now we have potentially the same thing happening to weblogging and all people can see is marketing and business, new social software vistas, and, more importantly — more people weblogging.
You know what?
The Internet belongs to AOL subscribers, too.
Weblogs
The only thing my own graduate work was a threat to was my own sanity, but here’s a story, Dissertation Could Be Security Threat, from today’s Washington Post of a different kind of dissertation danger:
Sean Gorman’s professor called his dissertation “tedious and unimportant.” Gorman didn’t talk about it when he went on dates because “it was so boring they’d start staring up at the ceiling.” But since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Gorman’s work has become so compelling that companies want to seize it, government officials want to suppress it, and al Qaeda operatives — if they could get their hands on it — would find a terrorist treasure map.
Gorman’s work takes publicly available information about the nation’s infrastructure — power grids, fiber optic networks, etc. — maps it all, and uses algorithms to find the weak points.
Interesting story about how using technology to crunch together a bunch of unclassified information results in aggregated knowledge that the government has an interest in classifying. The reporter does a good job of presenting both sides of the issue, though.
Politics, Technology & Internet