In some ways RSS could be accused of being the Emperors New Clothes of standards – the acronym has more than one meaning (including the Hindu Nationalist one), there are multiple versions, extending it via modules makes its use as generic as XML itself, and if you normalize the data flowing around in RSS, then the lowest common denominator is some text with a link surrounding it – hardly metadata, more like hypertext links. But to some extent, all standards are like the Emperors New Clothes in that they are not so much about specs and technical precision, but the virtual mindset that they occupy and the people and tools that use them. To this end, RSS is a winning meme, people outside of the grass roots weblog community are starting to talk about and use it and RSS 2.0 passes the good enough test (with a couple of tweaks…

For the record, I am onboard with Dave’s move to take RSS to the next level and appointing Brent Simmons and Jon Udell to an advisory board. At some point it would be good if this went through a standards organization like the W3C, however. I would suggest that it would be good if all RSS development focuses around a 2.0 core and that the developer community focus on RSS modules on the one hand and a message wrapper for RSS content based upon weblog API’s on the other. With this any RSS 1.0 community work or Atom (Echo) work should fold into this arena. RSS 2.0 meets the requirement that I see as key (extensibility through modules) and any fragmentation of effort will be counter productive. There is plenty of work to do with defining modules and message wrappers – and to that I would add ‘ping’ server architecture,…

Something interesting is happening in the world of online identities. The end goal is clear – a distributed, decentralized identity system where people have control over their own identity online – a people’s ‘Passport’ or what Marc Canter envisages as a people’s DNS. The problem is how to get there. Perhaps it will happen, in part, from the ground up through small steps such as personal data in systems such as Technorati or one line bio’s as personal RSS headlines? In fact, in true Dave Sifry style, Technorati seems to already be moving along these lines: see Technorati Profiles and check out the picture. Over the longer term, this is perhaps as ground breaking as what weblogs have done for web publishing and ultimately will leverage the weblog model to its full potential by creating a parry to content through people’s interests and requirements, creating a marketplace for RSS.

Jon’s Udell nails it with his analysis of wrapper technology for weblog content: “I like its RESTian purity, though I’d also be open to a SOAP variant that could optionally leverage all of the authorization and routing machinery” I wonder if it can be proved that any 2 dimentional SOAP message can be represented entirely as a 1 dimentional URL of a certain length. I suspect that this is the case, and if so, then the only thing that the REST model does not allow is to create a secure login mechanism that blocks access proactively. The REST model requires retroactively blocking access based upon IP address. In which case, perhaps you could have a URL encoded wrapper for RSS feeds, with a generic SOAP login wrapper if required. Perverse perhaps, but useful. In either case, the specification for the wrapper of weblog content should not specify the format used…

I’m not really interested in the politics of Echo, however, no matter what happens, a year or two from now we will have the way that publishing and aggregation works on the web nailed (most probably when Microsoft decide on what to adopt) – a development as important as the adoption of HTML and the web browser. This may include the Metaweblog API and RSS or a combined effort with a new XML schema in a SOAP wrapper. To my mind there is no problem in making RSS as is the default payload for SOAP content. A few tweaks that Echo already has would allow typing – e.g. avoiding the current madness where the mime type of the full content is not specified. So what are the missing bits? On the detailed level: RSS content is so unnormalized as to be almost useless for commercial applications. To build a searchable…