I didn't invent RSS. I did something much greater, I compromised.

published on 2024/02/12

I didn't invent RSS. I did something much greater, I compromised. We had the leading blogging software at the time, and Netscape had the feeds of four credible news orgs. When you put them together, that turned out to be huge power. We eventually pulled in all of social media and all of professional publishing into one format. Ask anyone who was active at the time. The blogging world adopted RSS in an instant, in 1999 and 2000. And in 2002, when the NYT adopted it, again, in an instant the entire news world all of a sudden all had RSS feeds. You can see it in the steady stream of announcements in the archive of this blog. #

BTW there was someone brilliant at Netscape who saw our compromise and responded with more compromise. Their next version of RSS had some of the features we had left behind in our format. We never asked them to do that, they just figured it out. Collaboration is something that requires two, one person can't collaborate on their own. I know that sounds ridiculous, but sometimes people don't look for the other party who made compromise possible.#

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Dave Winer's is a giant in open web protocol. His principle of always looking for collaboration and interoperability is wonderful. If you love your podcasts, you owe him a thank! His works were critical in creating them.