Winer in Boston
Dave Winer held a nifty East-coast weblog confab at his new Harvard digs last night. Lots of intriguing ideas about weblog technology.
Dave suggested that the RSS wars are settled, that RSS is settling down enough that it's stabilized (though not quite standardized). I wonder, though, whether the adoption of permissive "we'll read any RSS flavor" attitudes are papering over a new and bigger divide.
On one hand, some people want to use syndication for syndication -- for including headlines from one site on another site's page. But the success of NetNewsWire, Radio Userland, and a bunch of other RSS readers have made RSS an alternative format for writing weblogs -- not just a way of finding interesting Web pages but a replacement for Web pages. The purposes are diverging so far, so fast, that the underlying model is bound to get scuffed in the process.
For example, how long should the description of an item be? Is the description a headline? Should it encompass an entire weblog post, or just a few words?