Openness and Interoperability: and the evolution of podcasting
“A Sunday Morning Coffee Notes about Jobsian reality distortion fields, AutoLink (again, sorry), Feedburner, progress report on my outliner, and when quality really matters.”
Dave Winer discusses the upcoming Apple announcement, likely a transition to Intel processors, and how the tech industry tends to “manage” the buzz and speculation around such events. He also criticizes the practices of companies like Google and Feedburner, arguing they engage in “vendor lock-in” that harms users by making it difficult to move away from their services. Winer advocates for more open and interoperable standards, citing Postel’s Law, and suggests Feedburner could make it easier for users to migrate their RSS feeds. He also reflects on the evolution of podcasting, noting the one-year anniversary of his own podcast “Morning Coffee Notes”.
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Transcript
This transcript was automatically generated.
Hey, good morning, everybody.
It’s Dave Winer and it’s June 6, 2005, this morning, coffee notes. Before we all get swept up in the reality distortion field, if I can actually pronounce it, Apple, Steve Jobs , Intel, whatever, not that we aren’t already completely swamp ed with speculation about, it’s amazing how he gets us to do this. You know, when I had this fantasy that, you know, there was Steve Jobs on Thursday sitting there in his office saying, “Holy shit, all my efforts to control the buzz worked and nobody’s talking about the WWDC,” which was true. On Thursday, I mean, I had the talk with Michael Garnberg and really, nobody was talking about it except he noted that nobody was talking about it.
That was the extent to which people were talking about it.
So, he kind of imagined that Jobs called up somebody at news. com, you know, and said, “Well, you know, can we go on deep, deep background? You can say that some source close to Apple said blah, blah, blah,” and yeah, probably nothing so direct. But I think we’re being managed. Let’s put it that way.
I think this is a rollout. It’s hard to imagine at this point that it’s a deception. We’ve had it confirmed by the Wall Street Journal and by Robert Scoble. So, depending on whether you like big pubs or, you know, bloggers, there you go. There’s a Microsoft guy there and he says he knows and I don ’t think he would say that if he didn’t and then there’s the Wall Street Journal that says they’ve confirmed it and so kind of looks like that’s the story. Although Doc Searle throws a little curveball into it and says, “Maybe it’s Intel that’s having the sex change operation, not Apple. " What he means by that is maybe Intel is going to create, is going to manufacture the PowerPC chips and seems unlikely that that’s the answer. But it also seems very likely that this will be a transition, the beginning of a transition and that for some period of time, perhaps even an indefinite period of time, Apple will be producing both kinds of products. And you can also expect that if it does get announced the way it appears that it will be announced, that they will also release something exciting for the PowerPC line so that you don’t stop buying their hardware. It’s funny because I keep thinking about buying one myself. Every time my computer slows down because of spyware or I think it’s because of spy ware, it doesn’t matter whether it is or it isn’t. If I think it is, that makes me, every time that happens I think, well maybe I have to go, there is an Apple store about 30, 40 miles away from here. I could hop in the car, I could go and write them a check and then come home with a new computer. It probably would not get immediately poisoned by spy ware. It probably would go very nicely with my new car.
Anyway, before we all get completely swept away by this, I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about vendor lock-in and the feed burner situation.
Here’s the story. I’ve seen this happen a bunch of times.
Google does this and they do it extremely well. What they do is, if you were to come out and let’s say that they were to really test the waters in a really, really clear way on AutoLink, which was subject for controversy in February and March. In my mind still is subject for controversy except it was one of the very few people that noticed it. Most other people seem to have not noticed it or don’t seem to care. I don ’t understand that nor do I understand why people aren’t up in arms about what feed burner does as well. Although on a scale of 1 to 10, what Google did is a 9 and what feed burner does is a 5. It probably would be different if Google were doing what feed burner was doing because Google is so much larger, but they’re both pretty bad. What Google does is, it throws enough confusing features into the mix so it’s guaranteed that when the thing gets discussed, it’ll be confusing enough so that the casual observer, the one who isn’t watching this very closely, will say, “Well, there’s a difference of opinion. Some people feel pretty strongly about it one way, other people feel strongly about it another way, and frankly I’m too busy to have an opinion. " That’s what they’re trying for. They’re trying to confuse the people who, I mean, there’s no other explanation.
So beautifully crafted the way they did the Auto League thing is that it gets them on the other side of the slippery slope so that they can go start now engineering all the way into full content modification, but adds into every bit of content that they can find their way to on the internet without any compensation whatsoever to the source of the material.
No, this is just, come on, it’s nightmarish. It’s a complete breaking of all the rules for advertising. Basically, it ’s been totally opt in. I don’t have Google ads on pages that I don’t want them on. Now, all of a sudden, they’re putting ads on pages wherever they want. This idea that the user gets, that the user is in control of this is the tiniest of fig leaves. Try using that answer with the RIAA and their music. “Well, I should be able to do whatever I want to with all the music that I’ve gotten and bought on CD or were downloaded from the internet or whatever. " Come on, it doesn’t work that way. The people who create the content do have some rights. Ask Larry Lessig.
I mean, some of the strongest advocates of this remixing stuff. I have not spoken with Lessig about this and I don’t honestly know what his opinion is. I do know that he’s gone to a tremendous amount of trouble to do the creative commons.
That’s for a reason, so that people could explicitly state their intent with their content. It hardly seems consistent with that to say that, “Well, okay, now I can do whatever I want to with it. " It’s not just users because that’s the fig leaf. The fig leaf says basically, the story goes like this, “Well, I’m a user. It’s on my machine. I can do whatever I want to with it. " Well, but then Google supplies you with a piece of software that throws their ads into it, into that content. Say, “Well, it’s my choice. I can have them do that if I want to. " Come on, it ’s not you that’s putting the ads in there. It’s Google that’s putting the ads in there . Come on, there’s a third party in here and we’re not stupid. Get us all twisted up in argument. Again, it doesn’t convince somebody who’s really paying attention. What it does do, however, is it convinces the people who are only paying peripheral attention to it. It gets them to go, “Okay, I don’t need to get involved in this. This is just a controversy. It’s not a clear black and white issue. Forgive me, but it’s a Republican tactic.
It’s the kind of thing that they do.
Democrats for all their flaws generally tend to not want to confuse people too much. It’s the Republicans that throw this crap out there and we’ve got some Republicans in the technology business, basically, or people who use those kinds of tactics.
Now, I think that’s what Feedburner is doing here. I think they fully understand what they could be doing, what kind of a service they could be providing and they’re choosing not to provide that service.
They want lock-in. If they didn ’t want lock-in, they would be doing something very, very, very different from what they ’re doing. Now, lock-in is bad.
Lock-in is bad for users.
What it means is that it’s easy to get in, but you can’t get out. It’s like you’re buying to the loan shark guy. He solves your problem for a short period of time. It gets whoever it is that’s banging down your door trying to get the money from you. It gets them off your back, but now you’ve got to replace them with another problem and that problem is considerably worse than the problem you had before. The problem that Feed burner solves, the only problem that it solves is that it gets you some nice, and I won’t take this away from it, it gets you some nice statistical information about your feeds.
It doesn’t really save you money.
The bandwidth costs for RSS really aren’t that high. The costs of serving content have gone down while the usage has gone up. You’re not really saving money here. I haven’t got you numbers for that, but we could get the numbers. I don’t believe that you’ll find if you really look into it, that serving up your RSS feed is costing you all that much money. The bandwidth isn’t like you’re not saving money by doing this. What you ’re doing is you’re getting some more data. However, what you give up for this is you give up control of a major piece of your existence on the Internet, which is your RSS feed. It’s not your only existence.
You’ve got a blog too. You’ve got an email address, whatever else you’ve got. There are other things that make up you, but your RSS feed is a big part . If you’re an active publisher of web content, your RSS feed is becoming a very big part of who you are.
Why you’re giving it up is, well, what happens when Feed burner goes down? This is something that does now happen. Feedburn er is getting big. It’s getting a lot of users, and their server does go down from time to time. When your server goes down, nobody can get to your feeds. That’s just a fact.
They can’t get there. Now, people will say, “Well, you could put an htaccess file on it. " It’s assuming you’re using Apache, number one. Not everybody is. I run Apache on a couple of my servers, but on most of my servers, I run IIS or I run Manila. I don’t run Apache everywhere. Part of the argument there, they say use ht access, it’s a little bit intimidating, because maybe I don’t want to tell you that I’m not running Apache because I think it’s not cool if I don’t run Apache.
Well, the fact is a lot of people don’t run Apache, and htaccess is no solution. Okay, well, the other servers have ways of doing redirects as well. The other problem is that most people that have web content do not have the ability to program the htaccess file. Number one, number two, is even if they did, they wouldn’t begin to know how to do it. It’s not the most it ’s not something that they teach you in computer science. Well, maybe they do teach you in computer science 101, but it’s not something that web literate people generally know. Ask a non-technical user what’s involved in editing an htaccess file. Look, I have people whose eyes glaze over when you start talking about bit transfer rates, and that’s something you might think everybody can understand. You’d be amazed at how little people get about the technology of the web, and why should they have to understand the technology of the web? I mean, as a technologist, my idea is that the less technology you have to know in order to be able to use it as a communication tool, the better I like it as a technologist. I ’m happy to keep you blissfully unaware of the details. I know that in every other thing that I do, I love I insist on it.
I drive a car, I have a general idea of what gasoline it does. Have you ever lit gasoline on fire to see how powerful a force it is? I mean, it’s huge. Yeah, but usually that power is kept very nicely hidden from you behind the gas pump interface. And, you know, thank God you don’t have to see the explosions that make your car run. Also, have you ever, like, ever had a colonoscopy? I mean, I have had a colonoscopy. The cute thing about a colonoscopy is that you ’re conscious often. I was conscious when I had mine done. But you ’re also given these happy drugs that make you feel really, you know, sort of happy to be there. Everything’s really cool . And, you know, so I remember saying to the doctors, “Oh, is that me? I’m looking at this mass of goo, you know, this thing that was going up, you know, well, going up in a very private area. Well, you know, what you look like on the inside, but you really want to know, you know, you know, maybe you don’t want to know. Well, do you know what an HT Access file is? Maybe you don’t want to know what an HT Access file is. But could feed burner make it really, really, really easy for you to not be locked in? Yes, of course they could. How easy could they make it? Well, first of all, enter your Visa Mastercard number. So there’s the beautiful part of it for feed burners is that this could be a profit center for them. Why? Because domain registration is a profit center. It’s GoDad dy, for example. They charge $8.
95 a year for domain registration.
You know, any number of different places you can get.
Maybe you already have a domain .
Or maybe you want your own.
They could, you know, they could do it a different way.
They could say, you could have, they could give me dave. feedburner.
com, you know, to say, this is our gift to you, or they could sell it to me for, you know, $100 for a lifetime.
Maybe it would be a good deal for me to do that. What that means, though, is that then when I decide that it’s time for me to move and I don’t want to be on their servers, then basically what they can do is they can redirect that subdom ain to wherever it is I tell them to do it. They sign a contract that says they’ll do that. If I don’t trust them at that level, then maybe I don’t. Maybe I don ’t want to trust them. Maybe I just want to trust them to serve my content right now and only as long as I’m happy with the service they’re providing and not one minute longer. Okay? In which case, I don’t want to, like, have to trust them to turn the service over to me when I want it to be turned over. So what I do is I sign my own domain. I go to godaddy. com and I go register a domain. That’s something a lot of people have figured out. It could be made even easier, no doubt, but it’s already pretty damn easy. I mean, and go register a domain and then tell it to point that over to this place called feedburner . com and then feedburner. com, go over there and tell feedburner that I’m going to be pointing to my feeds using this domain name and then a tiny little bit of configuration on their end and they’re done. Basically , they can now map that domain over to your content and then any day you feel like moving it off, you can do it. That would be the safe way, the non- roach motel way to do this and it’s Internet 101. This isn’t major stuff and it’s funny how they say now that they’re looking into it because I said to them when they started coming at me personally , which is kind of what they always have done. It’s like they make it, “Oh, well Dave’s just complaining again. " It’s the same old shit that Google does when we talk about auto link. It’s just a few people and they’ve got a problem with it, whatever. It’s their problem really. There’s nothing wrong with the technology. That works to a point where basically you’ve got enough people that are sort of seeing it your way and people are beginning to see it that way about feedburn er because the servers have gone down and they’ve had this taste of what happens if feedburner would go away. They have this thought and then all of a sudden they think maybe this isn’t the best way for me to be managing my information. Let’s put our heads together on this one. Let’s get feedburn er onto a business that isn’t harmful to the RSS ecosystem.
There’s another thing that they do that they sell as a marketing benefit, the fact that they smooth out the incompat ibilities between various flavors of RSS. Now, this is another one of these things that they just really should stop doing.
First of all, it isn’t an issue. Because, yeah, there are flavors of RSS, different flavors, unfortunately.
I wish there weren’t, but there are. The fact is that the aggregated developers have accommodated for that. The service that they’re providing by giving you a choice of formats is no service whatsoever. The aggregated developers have already worked around this one. The only way it’s an advantage is if the bifurcation division continues to happen.
As long as they’re selling it as a marketing benefit, as long as they’re saying this is something that we do that’s a value to users and the users want to believe this or they want the users to believe this, then they’re going to be an agent for incompatibility. When we don’t need any more agents for incompatibility, what we need is vendors ought to be agents for coalescing. That goes to a very simple rule, which is called Postel’s Law. People often overlook that there are two sides to Postel’s Law. Post el’s Law says, now let’s see if I get this right because I get a little dyslexic on this . Postel’s Law says that you should be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you expect, liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.
In other words, don’t support two different flavors or three different flavors of RSS.
Support one. Okay, I know which one I would like you to support.
That would be RSS 2. 0. But if you have to choose another one, okay, choose another one.
But it would be better if we all chose the same one. I don’t know anybody who disag rees with that statement. We may disagree about which one you should choose, but does anybody disagree that it’s better that we just have one or that we have the or if you have a choice between N+1 and N that you would always go for N? Of course. Of course, that’s common sense. Unless you ’ve tried to build a company based on the selling proposition that you can smooth out incompatibilities between these things, in which case, you’re going to want more incompat ibilities. And that’s spooky.
Why an investor would want to plunk down and they’ve raised, like, whatever, $6 million.
Why an investor would want to put down a bet on that? Well, that’s really that’s disturbing.
And, you know, we’ve got to get through this. Basically, there haven’t been there hasn’t been so much money invested in RSS. It should have been invested years ago when the tools were in very, you know, early stages. And the big companies really didn’t see any opportunity for themselves here. Now that’s all changed. And now we have to deal with sort of like these investors that have sort of put down these really small, relatively for them, relatively small bets. And on what I think are rather precar ious ideas, business ideas.
But Feedburner this ought to be an easy one to fix because they’re a small company.
Google Google, I think, is out of our reach. I don’t think we can get them to play fair here. Or, you know, maybe we can, but I don’t know how to do it. But anyway, this is that ’s sort of like my summary. Now, of course, we’re all going to go into we’re all going to go into reality distortion mode . And we’re all going to go crazy about Apple. And that will last us for probably about a week. And then we’ll go on to , hopefully, something else that getting by the way, my outliner’s coming along great. I’m having very productive programming days and very excited about the way this is shaping up. And I’m taking all these lessons to heart. And I’m making absolutely sure that you ’ve got infinite choice in where you do your hosting. Because this is going to be obviously, it’s going to be very much an Internet-aware piece of software. And I also want to get a reference release together of a server-side version of the same software.
It probably won’t even be a version. It probably will just be the same software. That , you know, if you boot it up on a server, it’ll come ready to do server-type things. But if you boot it up on a desktop, it’ll you know, it’ll be an outliner. So, like I said, having a great time. It’s interesting.
Chance to put my ideas into practice, too. It’s good to somebody said I forget who it was said that script ing news is its most interesting when I’m doing software development. So, look for some more interesting stuff. And anyway, so that’s about it. We ’re 21 minutes. And I always like to do this these days to see where we’re at, you know, at different points in the podcast. You do have another couple of ideas that I probably should talk about. Let’s see if we’ve got, like, another minute or two to talk about this quality issue.
Greg Del Sesto, who is an investment banker, listener to Morning Coffee Notes, interestingly, not a reader of scripting news.
He found out about Morning Coffee Notes, the podcast that you’re listening to right now, through some publicity for podcasting and wasn’t really aware if you’re one of those people who’s not aware of my blog, it’s www. scriptingscript ing. com.
And if you ever notice that there is a sort of hiatus in Morning Coffee Notes podcast stuff, which basically I haven ’t done one in pretty close to a week, then you might want to check out the blog, because it’s usually I’m usually posting there every day. Come rain or shine or whatever.
Anyway, so Greg listens to my podcast and is a very intelligent guy, very, I say, extremely intelligent and thoughtful.
When I was in Boston, I like to do this every once in a while.
I’d never met this guy before.
I didn’t know him at all.
But he had sent me a couple of emails about podcasts. He’s a big outliner user. He uses a program called The Brain, and he’s absolutely convinced that you need, in order to be able to be productive with an out liner, you need to be able to see multiple parents. Not only do you need to be able to have multiple parents for a headline , but you need to be able to visually see them. And I went into the meeting having my doubts about this, and he showed me what he’s doing. And I was quite impressed, actually. And he changed my thinking about a subject, which I like to think that I’m an expert in. So that’s pretty good when somebody can do that for you, because it just is. And it’s good to keep an open mind, because sometimes you will get a new idea will come into your brain that way.
Anyway, what Greg wanted to say was, because I always go on, we ’re in the age of decentral ization.
Where quality mattered so much in the past, what’s cool now is that singing is not just for the person who sings the best. Writing isn’t just for the best person. We get to see some creativity and some humanity and stuff like that.
Of course, if you’ve been listening to my podcast, you know that I talk about this all the time. But he said, “Quality does have a place. " And I said, “Really?” He said, “Yeah, well, would you like to have somebody operate on you, do surgery on you, if they weren’t really good at what they do?” And I said, “Hmm, actually, it ’s a good point. " And I said, " You know, because I was going to fly that day from Boston to Orlando, Florida. " And I said, “You know, it’s true. Quality matters. " And I don’t want to get on an airplane where somebody flying the plane doesn ’t really know what they’re doing. So yeah, so that there’s some points where quality is important and other points where amateur ism and maybe even lack of quality is a good thing. And I said, “I make no excuses for what I say. I don’t need to defend it because we’ve had our whole lives. He’s 55 years old. I’m 50. " For both of our entire lives, we’ve been hearing that you have to be the best in order to have a right to be creative. So if you have one person who’s holding up the other end while everybody else is saying the opposite, well, that doesn’t seem wrong to me.
But now I thought I would balance it. I said, “Yeah, it’s true.
Quality does matter in some cases. " Not in every case, though. And so there is some line in there where on one side of that line, you want to know that the person doing it, doing what it is that they’re doing, has achieved some level of excellence at it. And then on the other side of the line, you don’t really care so much. And it’s important that it be something that everybody try . I don’t think everybody should try flying a plane. I don’t think everybody should try surgery. Driving a car is something that you have to wait till your certain age to do. There are limits, and those limits are important to a safe functioning of our civilization. So Greg Del Cesto, you had a good point , and I wanted to acknowledge that. And I want to thank you for that as well. So with that in mind, let’s go. Now I’ll probably talk to you after whatever Apple’s announcement is. It was just one more reminder.
June 11th is the one year anniversary of this podcast. It was in June 11th in 2004 that I took out a microphone. I had gotten this piece of software called “Polder Bits,” which is still what I’m using to record this now. Very nice, very simple, easy to use piece of software. I don’t know how it works. You plug a microphone into your machine and hit the record button and boom, out the other end comes an MP3 file that’s suitable for uploading.
And it was on June 11th, which is coming up pretty soon. And I just opened up a microphone and I started talking. And the first podcast was, I started out in response to a Gilmore Gang that I had heard. So clearly I wasn’t the first to do this stuff, but it was pretty early. And I think that it’s important to note the milestones when they come around.
And we’re about to come around to one right now. So there you have it. Anyway, so it’s 27 minutes into it and June 5th , 2005 morning coffee notes.
This is Dave Winer. Talk to you again real soon. Bye.
It’s Dave Winer and it’s June 6, 2005, this morning, coffee notes. Before we all get swept up in the reality distortion field, if I can actually pronounce it, Apple, Steve Jobs , Intel, whatever, not that we aren’t already completely swamp ed with speculation about, it’s amazing how he gets us to do this. You know, when I had this fantasy that, you know, there was Steve Jobs on Thursday sitting there in his office saying, “Holy shit, all my efforts to control the buzz worked and nobody’s talking about the WWDC,” which was true. On Thursday, I mean, I had the talk with Michael Garnberg and really, nobody was talking about it except he noted that nobody was talking about it.
That was the extent to which people were talking about it.
So, he kind of imagined that Jobs called up somebody at news. com, you know, and said, “Well, you know, can we go on deep, deep background? You can say that some source close to Apple said blah, blah, blah,” and yeah, probably nothing so direct. But I think we’re being managed. Let’s put it that way.
I think this is a rollout. It’s hard to imagine at this point that it’s a deception. We’ve had it confirmed by the Wall Street Journal and by Robert Scoble. So, depending on whether you like big pubs or, you know, bloggers, there you go. There’s a Microsoft guy there and he says he knows and I don ’t think he would say that if he didn’t and then there’s the Wall Street Journal that says they’ve confirmed it and so kind of looks like that’s the story. Although Doc Searle throws a little curveball into it and says, “Maybe it’s Intel that’s having the sex change operation, not Apple. " What he means by that is maybe Intel is going to create, is going to manufacture the PowerPC chips and seems unlikely that that’s the answer. But it also seems very likely that this will be a transition, the beginning of a transition and that for some period of time, perhaps even an indefinite period of time, Apple will be producing both kinds of products. And you can also expect that if it does get announced the way it appears that it will be announced, that they will also release something exciting for the PowerPC line so that you don’t stop buying their hardware. It’s funny because I keep thinking about buying one myself. Every time my computer slows down because of spyware or I think it’s because of spy ware, it doesn’t matter whether it is or it isn’t. If I think it is, that makes me, every time that happens I think, well maybe I have to go, there is an Apple store about 30, 40 miles away from here. I could hop in the car, I could go and write them a check and then come home with a new computer. It probably would not get immediately poisoned by spy ware. It probably would go very nicely with my new car.
Anyway, before we all get completely swept away by this, I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about vendor lock-in and the feed burner situation.
Here’s the story. I’ve seen this happen a bunch of times.
Google does this and they do it extremely well. What they do is, if you were to come out and let’s say that they were to really test the waters in a really, really clear way on AutoLink, which was subject for controversy in February and March. In my mind still is subject for controversy except it was one of the very few people that noticed it. Most other people seem to have not noticed it or don’t seem to care. I don ’t understand that nor do I understand why people aren’t up in arms about what feed burner does as well. Although on a scale of 1 to 10, what Google did is a 9 and what feed burner does is a 5. It probably would be different if Google were doing what feed burner was doing because Google is so much larger, but they’re both pretty bad. What Google does is, it throws enough confusing features into the mix so it’s guaranteed that when the thing gets discussed, it’ll be confusing enough so that the casual observer, the one who isn’t watching this very closely, will say, “Well, there’s a difference of opinion. Some people feel pretty strongly about it one way, other people feel strongly about it another way, and frankly I’m too busy to have an opinion. " That’s what they’re trying for. They’re trying to confuse the people who, I mean, there’s no other explanation.
So beautifully crafted the way they did the Auto League thing is that it gets them on the other side of the slippery slope so that they can go start now engineering all the way into full content modification, but adds into every bit of content that they can find their way to on the internet without any compensation whatsoever to the source of the material.
No, this is just, come on, it’s nightmarish. It’s a complete breaking of all the rules for advertising. Basically, it ’s been totally opt in. I don’t have Google ads on pages that I don’t want them on. Now, all of a sudden, they’re putting ads on pages wherever they want. This idea that the user gets, that the user is in control of this is the tiniest of fig leaves. Try using that answer with the RIAA and their music. “Well, I should be able to do whatever I want to with all the music that I’ve gotten and bought on CD or were downloaded from the internet or whatever. " Come on, it doesn’t work that way. The people who create the content do have some rights. Ask Larry Lessig.
I mean, some of the strongest advocates of this remixing stuff. I have not spoken with Lessig about this and I don’t honestly know what his opinion is. I do know that he’s gone to a tremendous amount of trouble to do the creative commons.
That’s for a reason, so that people could explicitly state their intent with their content. It hardly seems consistent with that to say that, “Well, okay, now I can do whatever I want to with it. " It’s not just users because that’s the fig leaf. The fig leaf says basically, the story goes like this, “Well, I’m a user. It’s on my machine. I can do whatever I want to with it. " Well, but then Google supplies you with a piece of software that throws their ads into it, into that content. Say, “Well, it’s my choice. I can have them do that if I want to. " Come on, it ’s not you that’s putting the ads in there. It’s Google that’s putting the ads in there . Come on, there’s a third party in here and we’re not stupid. Get us all twisted up in argument. Again, it doesn’t convince somebody who’s really paying attention. What it does do, however, is it convinces the people who are only paying peripheral attention to it. It gets them to go, “Okay, I don’t need to get involved in this. This is just a controversy. It’s not a clear black and white issue. Forgive me, but it’s a Republican tactic.
It’s the kind of thing that they do.
Democrats for all their flaws generally tend to not want to confuse people too much. It’s the Republicans that throw this crap out there and we’ve got some Republicans in the technology business, basically, or people who use those kinds of tactics.
Now, I think that’s what Feedburner is doing here. I think they fully understand what they could be doing, what kind of a service they could be providing and they’re choosing not to provide that service.
They want lock-in. If they didn ’t want lock-in, they would be doing something very, very, very different from what they ’re doing. Now, lock-in is bad.
Lock-in is bad for users.
What it means is that it’s easy to get in, but you can’t get out. It’s like you’re buying to the loan shark guy. He solves your problem for a short period of time. It gets whoever it is that’s banging down your door trying to get the money from you. It gets them off your back, but now you’ve got to replace them with another problem and that problem is considerably worse than the problem you had before. The problem that Feed burner solves, the only problem that it solves is that it gets you some nice, and I won’t take this away from it, it gets you some nice statistical information about your feeds.
It doesn’t really save you money.
The bandwidth costs for RSS really aren’t that high. The costs of serving content have gone down while the usage has gone up. You’re not really saving money here. I haven’t got you numbers for that, but we could get the numbers. I don’t believe that you’ll find if you really look into it, that serving up your RSS feed is costing you all that much money. The bandwidth isn’t like you’re not saving money by doing this. What you ’re doing is you’re getting some more data. However, what you give up for this is you give up control of a major piece of your existence on the Internet, which is your RSS feed. It’s not your only existence.
You’ve got a blog too. You’ve got an email address, whatever else you’ve got. There are other things that make up you, but your RSS feed is a big part . If you’re an active publisher of web content, your RSS feed is becoming a very big part of who you are.
Why you’re giving it up is, well, what happens when Feed burner goes down? This is something that does now happen. Feedburn er is getting big. It’s getting a lot of users, and their server does go down from time to time. When your server goes down, nobody can get to your feeds. That’s just a fact.
They can’t get there. Now, people will say, “Well, you could put an htaccess file on it. " It’s assuming you’re using Apache, number one. Not everybody is. I run Apache on a couple of my servers, but on most of my servers, I run IIS or I run Manila. I don’t run Apache everywhere. Part of the argument there, they say use ht access, it’s a little bit intimidating, because maybe I don’t want to tell you that I’m not running Apache because I think it’s not cool if I don’t run Apache.
Well, the fact is a lot of people don’t run Apache, and htaccess is no solution. Okay, well, the other servers have ways of doing redirects as well. The other problem is that most people that have web content do not have the ability to program the htaccess file. Number one, number two, is even if they did, they wouldn’t begin to know how to do it. It’s not the most it ’s not something that they teach you in computer science. Well, maybe they do teach you in computer science 101, but it’s not something that web literate people generally know. Ask a non-technical user what’s involved in editing an htaccess file. Look, I have people whose eyes glaze over when you start talking about bit transfer rates, and that’s something you might think everybody can understand. You’d be amazed at how little people get about the technology of the web, and why should they have to understand the technology of the web? I mean, as a technologist, my idea is that the less technology you have to know in order to be able to use it as a communication tool, the better I like it as a technologist. I ’m happy to keep you blissfully unaware of the details. I know that in every other thing that I do, I love I insist on it.
I drive a car, I have a general idea of what gasoline it does. Have you ever lit gasoline on fire to see how powerful a force it is? I mean, it’s huge. Yeah, but usually that power is kept very nicely hidden from you behind the gas pump interface. And, you know, thank God you don’t have to see the explosions that make your car run. Also, have you ever, like, ever had a colonoscopy? I mean, I have had a colonoscopy. The cute thing about a colonoscopy is that you ’re conscious often. I was conscious when I had mine done. But you ’re also given these happy drugs that make you feel really, you know, sort of happy to be there. Everything’s really cool . And, you know, so I remember saying to the doctors, “Oh, is that me? I’m looking at this mass of goo, you know, this thing that was going up, you know, well, going up in a very private area. Well, you know, what you look like on the inside, but you really want to know, you know, you know, maybe you don’t want to know. Well, do you know what an HT Access file is? Maybe you don’t want to know what an HT Access file is. But could feed burner make it really, really, really easy for you to not be locked in? Yes, of course they could. How easy could they make it? Well, first of all, enter your Visa Mastercard number. So there’s the beautiful part of it for feed burners is that this could be a profit center for them. Why? Because domain registration is a profit center. It’s GoDad dy, for example. They charge $8.
95 a year for domain registration.
You know, any number of different places you can get.
Maybe you already have a domain .
Or maybe you want your own.
They could, you know, they could do it a different way.
They could say, you could have, they could give me dave. feedburner.
com, you know, to say, this is our gift to you, or they could sell it to me for, you know, $100 for a lifetime.
Maybe it would be a good deal for me to do that. What that means, though, is that then when I decide that it’s time for me to move and I don’t want to be on their servers, then basically what they can do is they can redirect that subdom ain to wherever it is I tell them to do it. They sign a contract that says they’ll do that. If I don’t trust them at that level, then maybe I don’t. Maybe I don ’t want to trust them. Maybe I just want to trust them to serve my content right now and only as long as I’m happy with the service they’re providing and not one minute longer. Okay? In which case, I don’t want to, like, have to trust them to turn the service over to me when I want it to be turned over. So what I do is I sign my own domain. I go to godaddy. com and I go register a domain. That’s something a lot of people have figured out. It could be made even easier, no doubt, but it’s already pretty damn easy. I mean, and go register a domain and then tell it to point that over to this place called feedburner . com and then feedburner. com, go over there and tell feedburner that I’m going to be pointing to my feeds using this domain name and then a tiny little bit of configuration on their end and they’re done. Basically , they can now map that domain over to your content and then any day you feel like moving it off, you can do it. That would be the safe way, the non- roach motel way to do this and it’s Internet 101. This isn’t major stuff and it’s funny how they say now that they’re looking into it because I said to them when they started coming at me personally , which is kind of what they always have done. It’s like they make it, “Oh, well Dave’s just complaining again. " It’s the same old shit that Google does when we talk about auto link. It’s just a few people and they’ve got a problem with it, whatever. It’s their problem really. There’s nothing wrong with the technology. That works to a point where basically you’ve got enough people that are sort of seeing it your way and people are beginning to see it that way about feedburn er because the servers have gone down and they’ve had this taste of what happens if feedburner would go away. They have this thought and then all of a sudden they think maybe this isn’t the best way for me to be managing my information. Let’s put our heads together on this one. Let’s get feedburn er onto a business that isn’t harmful to the RSS ecosystem.
There’s another thing that they do that they sell as a marketing benefit, the fact that they smooth out the incompat ibilities between various flavors of RSS. Now, this is another one of these things that they just really should stop doing.
First of all, it isn’t an issue. Because, yeah, there are flavors of RSS, different flavors, unfortunately.
I wish there weren’t, but there are. The fact is that the aggregated developers have accommodated for that. The service that they’re providing by giving you a choice of formats is no service whatsoever. The aggregated developers have already worked around this one. The only way it’s an advantage is if the bifurcation division continues to happen.
As long as they’re selling it as a marketing benefit, as long as they’re saying this is something that we do that’s a value to users and the users want to believe this or they want the users to believe this, then they’re going to be an agent for incompatibility. When we don’t need any more agents for incompatibility, what we need is vendors ought to be agents for coalescing. That goes to a very simple rule, which is called Postel’s Law. People often overlook that there are two sides to Postel’s Law. Post el’s Law says, now let’s see if I get this right because I get a little dyslexic on this . Postel’s Law says that you should be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you expect, liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.
In other words, don’t support two different flavors or three different flavors of RSS.
Support one. Okay, I know which one I would like you to support.
That would be RSS 2. 0. But if you have to choose another one, okay, choose another one.
But it would be better if we all chose the same one. I don’t know anybody who disag rees with that statement. We may disagree about which one you should choose, but does anybody disagree that it’s better that we just have one or that we have the or if you have a choice between N+1 and N that you would always go for N? Of course. Of course, that’s common sense. Unless you ’ve tried to build a company based on the selling proposition that you can smooth out incompatibilities between these things, in which case, you’re going to want more incompat ibilities. And that’s spooky.
Why an investor would want to plunk down and they’ve raised, like, whatever, $6 million.
Why an investor would want to put down a bet on that? Well, that’s really that’s disturbing.
And, you know, we’ve got to get through this. Basically, there haven’t been there hasn’t been so much money invested in RSS. It should have been invested years ago when the tools were in very, you know, early stages. And the big companies really didn’t see any opportunity for themselves here. Now that’s all changed. And now we have to deal with sort of like these investors that have sort of put down these really small, relatively for them, relatively small bets. And on what I think are rather precar ious ideas, business ideas.
But Feedburner this ought to be an easy one to fix because they’re a small company.
Google Google, I think, is out of our reach. I don’t think we can get them to play fair here. Or, you know, maybe we can, but I don’t know how to do it. But anyway, this is that ’s sort of like my summary. Now, of course, we’re all going to go into we’re all going to go into reality distortion mode . And we’re all going to go crazy about Apple. And that will last us for probably about a week. And then we’ll go on to , hopefully, something else that getting by the way, my outliner’s coming along great. I’m having very productive programming days and very excited about the way this is shaping up. And I’m taking all these lessons to heart. And I’m making absolutely sure that you ’ve got infinite choice in where you do your hosting. Because this is going to be obviously, it’s going to be very much an Internet-aware piece of software. And I also want to get a reference release together of a server-side version of the same software.
It probably won’t even be a version. It probably will just be the same software. That , you know, if you boot it up on a server, it’ll come ready to do server-type things. But if you boot it up on a desktop, it’ll you know, it’ll be an outliner. So, like I said, having a great time. It’s interesting.
Chance to put my ideas into practice, too. It’s good to somebody said I forget who it was said that script ing news is its most interesting when I’m doing software development. So, look for some more interesting stuff. And anyway, so that’s about it. We ’re 21 minutes. And I always like to do this these days to see where we’re at, you know, at different points in the podcast. You do have another couple of ideas that I probably should talk about. Let’s see if we’ve got, like, another minute or two to talk about this quality issue.
Greg Del Sesto, who is an investment banker, listener to Morning Coffee Notes, interestingly, not a reader of scripting news.
He found out about Morning Coffee Notes, the podcast that you’re listening to right now, through some publicity for podcasting and wasn’t really aware if you’re one of those people who’s not aware of my blog, it’s www. scriptingscript ing. com.
And if you ever notice that there is a sort of hiatus in Morning Coffee Notes podcast stuff, which basically I haven ’t done one in pretty close to a week, then you might want to check out the blog, because it’s usually I’m usually posting there every day. Come rain or shine or whatever.
Anyway, so Greg listens to my podcast and is a very intelligent guy, very, I say, extremely intelligent and thoughtful.
When I was in Boston, I like to do this every once in a while.
I’d never met this guy before.
I didn’t know him at all.
But he had sent me a couple of emails about podcasts. He’s a big outliner user. He uses a program called The Brain, and he’s absolutely convinced that you need, in order to be able to be productive with an out liner, you need to be able to see multiple parents. Not only do you need to be able to have multiple parents for a headline , but you need to be able to visually see them. And I went into the meeting having my doubts about this, and he showed me what he’s doing. And I was quite impressed, actually. And he changed my thinking about a subject, which I like to think that I’m an expert in. So that’s pretty good when somebody can do that for you, because it just is. And it’s good to keep an open mind, because sometimes you will get a new idea will come into your brain that way.
Anyway, what Greg wanted to say was, because I always go on, we ’re in the age of decentral ization.
Where quality mattered so much in the past, what’s cool now is that singing is not just for the person who sings the best. Writing isn’t just for the best person. We get to see some creativity and some humanity and stuff like that.
Of course, if you’ve been listening to my podcast, you know that I talk about this all the time. But he said, “Quality does have a place. " And I said, “Really?” He said, “Yeah, well, would you like to have somebody operate on you, do surgery on you, if they weren’t really good at what they do?” And I said, “Hmm, actually, it ’s a good point. " And I said, " You know, because I was going to fly that day from Boston to Orlando, Florida. " And I said, “You know, it’s true. Quality matters. " And I don’t want to get on an airplane where somebody flying the plane doesn ’t really know what they’re doing. So yeah, so that there’s some points where quality is important and other points where amateur ism and maybe even lack of quality is a good thing. And I said, “I make no excuses for what I say. I don’t need to defend it because we’ve had our whole lives. He’s 55 years old. I’m 50. " For both of our entire lives, we’ve been hearing that you have to be the best in order to have a right to be creative. So if you have one person who’s holding up the other end while everybody else is saying the opposite, well, that doesn’t seem wrong to me.
But now I thought I would balance it. I said, “Yeah, it’s true.
Quality does matter in some cases. " Not in every case, though. And so there is some line in there where on one side of that line, you want to know that the person doing it, doing what it is that they’re doing, has achieved some level of excellence at it. And then on the other side of the line, you don’t really care so much. And it’s important that it be something that everybody try . I don’t think everybody should try flying a plane. I don’t think everybody should try surgery. Driving a car is something that you have to wait till your certain age to do. There are limits, and those limits are important to a safe functioning of our civilization. So Greg Del Cesto, you had a good point , and I wanted to acknowledge that. And I want to thank you for that as well. So with that in mind, let’s go. Now I’ll probably talk to you after whatever Apple’s announcement is. It was just one more reminder.
June 11th is the one year anniversary of this podcast. It was in June 11th in 2004 that I took out a microphone. I had gotten this piece of software called “Polder Bits,” which is still what I’m using to record this now. Very nice, very simple, easy to use piece of software. I don’t know how it works. You plug a microphone into your machine and hit the record button and boom, out the other end comes an MP3 file that’s suitable for uploading.
And it was on June 11th, which is coming up pretty soon. And I just opened up a microphone and I started talking. And the first podcast was, I started out in response to a Gilmore Gang that I had heard. So clearly I wasn’t the first to do this stuff, but it was pretty early. And I think that it’s important to note the milestones when they come around.
And we’re about to come around to one right now. So there you have it. Anyway, so it’s 27 minutes into it and June 5th , 2005 morning coffee notes.
This is Dave Winer. Talk to you again real soon. Bye.