Flutterby™! : Fact checking 2003-05-09 18:14:13.950672+00

Fact checking

2003-05-09 18:14:13.950672+00 by Dan Lyke 8 comments

Somebody needs to fact check Dave Winer:

On this day in 1999 we opened up the channel list for My.UserLand.... At that time all weblogs were done in Frontier.

Ummm... I don't know how many other counter-examples I'd need to provide, I can come up with probably at least 10 off the top of my head, most of what became the "A-list", but this one wasn't. Of course at that point I might have still called Flutterby a "microportal" or one of the other terms that was flying around, but yeesh, Dave, is your version of history really that limited?

You need to quit with this "stop" energy and personal attacks, Dan. It gets in the way of providing quality software.

#Comment made: 2003-05-09 19:46:31.080546+00 by: mkelley [edit history]

I kept a weblog/journal in 96 & 99', and used Notepad, Frontpage, & a Palm III, and some space on Chatt. Online or Homestead, and rather resent that Mr. Winer says all weblogs were Frontier weblogs. I would call earlier sites, like David Siegel's notes site weblogs, as Jerry Pournelle's pages on his domain and earier Earthlink sites are weblogs too. And most of those were handcoded without a fancy app like Radio.

I just reread that post you pointed to, Dan, and I found something interesting in it considering all the cries for credit I've seen lately.

Now, I'm all for giving credit where credit is due and I firmly believe that a certain Harvard Fellow deserves credit for RSS being what and where it is today but in an arena where "semantics" is so much a battle cry I think the term "major contributor" is much more semantically correct than the term "creator".

What and where *is* RSS today? I get the impression that it turns the entire web into a sort of LiveJournal friends list, but I really don't understand what the point is.

The point, for me, is that I can fairly easily read weblog/news/comment postings without having to go anywhere near a web browser.

I think that part of what makes syndication useful is your choice of tools. Before I leave home in the morning, I open up my laptop and tell Opera to open all links in my "daily reads" folder. Then I go wash the dishes, fold up the laptop, and head for the ferry.

If I used IE

I'd probably want something to aggregate all that into a single page that something else loaded.

But the real reason I'm writing this is to note that there's another thread listing May 1999 non-Frontier websites just in case this entry gets viewed outside the larger Flutterby concept.

Mars, RSS has moved to the point that it is a true syndication format rather than a summary format. So much information is included in RSS 1.0 and 2.0 (two competing formats rather than an older and a newer format) that there is a movement in place to use RSS as a backup format for weblogs and an import/export format to move from one tool to another.

To give Dave credit where credit is due he is the author and copyright holder of the documents that set forth the RSS 0.92 and 2.0 standards. The formats are freely available to use but he does hold the copyright on the documents defining those standards.

The point of RSS, though, is to be able to pull in all of he sites that you normally read for offline viewing or for easily seeing when a site updates. I use SharpReader as my aggregator and it just sets in my Windows system tray and changes colors when something has updated.