Scripting News: Dave Winer, creator of RSS, is immersed in a continuing battle over the blogging standard and the Echo project. I still can’t figure the whole dispute out, but Winer is apparently upset that people are trying to re-write RSS…or something. I don’t know, but Winer is a smart, experienced guy, and he makes a scary prediction here:
“…control of RSS will go to the BigCo’s, probably Microsoft, possibly a battle between IBM, Microsoft and Google.”
He’s talked about this before, and this is exactly what the people over at Echo are trying to prevent. But will deconstructing RSS and the two blogging APIs right now give some other company a chance to displace it?
If someone can give a good thumbnail sketch of the core of this dispute, could you post a comment?
I may have gotten a handle on it. Winer wrote the original RSS standard, and then someone else...
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/09/26/rss20template.html
...wrote 2.0 without Winer's endorsement or permission. Apparently they invaded his project...or something. Again, not 100% clear here, but this is my current theory.