Settlement Reached with Dave Winer

I've reached an agreement with Dave Winer regarding the Share Your OPML web application. I destroyed his original code and user data along with everything that was built from it and gave up my claim to a one-third stake in feeds.scripting.com. He gave up the claim that he's owed $5,000.

I originally hoped one of us would buy the other out and launch the application, but we found a much stronger basis for agreement in a mutual desire to stop working together as quickly as possible.

If Share Your OPML was a Java project I would've been heartsick to destroy it, but I coded the application in PHP. I've never written anything in PHP I didn't want to completely rewrite six months later.

Some people think I'm an asshat for taking this public, and I won't argue with that, but I don't have the resources to fight an intellectual property lawsuit against a millionaire. Winer knows this -- he's been a guest in my home -- and it's clear his attorney was acting from the same assumption throughout the settlement negotiation.

I decided the best way to avoid court was to show Winer what it would be like to sue a blogger.

I figured the publicity would be a stronger motivator to resolve the matter than anything I could say through an attorney. He's one of the most galvanizing figures in the technology industry. If he ever sues someone, the publication of the case's motions and depositions will put a blog in the Technorati Top 100. Since publishing the letter from Winer's attorney, my traffic's through the roof, I'm getting fan mail and I received three programming job offers.

I'm extremely grateful for the public support and the offers to contribute to a legal defense fund on my behalf, which I was hoping might lead to a Free Kevin-style sticker-based political movement.

Some programmers have said that I was foolish to write the app on the basis of a verbal agreement, and I'll concede that wholeheartedly. I won't even do the laundry now without something in writing.

I'm not going to close the book on this debacle with any Panglossian happy talk about how it all worked out for the best. This was a completely unnecessary sphincter-fusing legal dispute that could have been settled amicably months ago without benefit of counsel.

But I'm glad to stop pursuing an application so closely associated with OPML, because I don't share Winer's enthusiasm for the format.

I used to feel differently, but now that I've worked with it extensively, OPML's an underspecified, one-size-fits-all kludge that doesn't serve a purpose beyond the exchange of simple data. There's little need for an XML dialect to represent outlines. Any XML format is a hierachy of parent-child relationships that could be editable as an outline with a single addition: a collapsed attribute that's either true or false.

Developers who build on OPML will encounter a lot of odd data because the format has been extended in a non-standard way. An outline item's type attribute has a value that indicates the other attributes which might be present. No one knows how many different attributes are in use today, so if you tell users that your software "supports OPML," you're telling them you support arbitrary XML data that can't be checked against a document type definition.

OPML's also the only XML dialect I'm aware of that stuffs all character data inside attributes. Now that OPML's being turned into a weblog publishing format, outline items will have ginormous attribute values holding escaped HTML markup like this:

<outline text="&lt;img src="http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2006/03/16/chockfull.jpg" width="53" height="73" border="0" align="right" hspace="15" vspace="5" alt="A picture named chockfull.jpg"&gt;&lt;a href="http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/03/16/the-new-a-list/"&gt;Scoble laments&lt;/a&gt; all the flamers in the thread on &lt;b style="color:black;background-color:#ffff66"&gt;Rogers Cadenhead's&lt;/b&gt; site, but isn't it obvious that the &lt;i&gt;purpose&lt;/i&gt; of his post was to get a flamewar going? What non-flamer is going to post in the middle of a festival like that one? I'm not as worried about it as Scoble is, because I've seen better flamewars and I know how they turn out. In a few days he's still going to have to try to resolve the matter with me, and the flamers will have gone on to some other trumped-up controversy. The days when you could fool any number of real people with a charade like this are long past. And people who use pseudonyms to call public figures schoolyard names are not really very serious or threatening. &lt;a href="http://allied.blogspot.com/2006/03/lynch-mob-security.html"&gt;Jeneane Sessum&lt;/a&gt; is right in saying it's extreme to call this a lynch mob. It's just a bunch of &lt;a href="http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/news/2881/letter-dave-winers-attorney#46458"&gt;anonymous comments&lt;/a&gt; on a snarky blog post. Big deal. Not.&nbsp;&lt;a href="http://www.scripting.com/2006/03/16.html#When:11:21:10PM"&gt;" created="Tue, 16 March 2006 11:21:10 GMT"/>

I'd be amazed if XML parsers can handle attribute values of any length, but that's what's being done today with OPML.

Now that an agreement has been reached, Winer doesn't have to share Share Your OPML and I can flee in terror before any border skirmishes lead to another XML specification war.

Maybe this is the best of all possible worlds.

Update: Winer appears to have launched a new PHP-based implementation of Share Your OPML with Dan MacTough.

Xml · Rss · Php · Opml · Java · Html · 2006/05/02 · 20 COMMENTS · Link

Much Ado about Nothing

Matt Haughey started catching hell from members of a site called Shoutwire who thought he had hacked Fox News to steal traffic for his personal weblog, A Whole Lotta Nothing.

Turns out that loading a Fox News story within a frame, as Shoutwire did, triggers some Javascript code that redirects the visitor to "http://nothing":

if (parent.frames.length > 0) {
  parent.location.href = "http://nothing";
}

In Mozilla Firefox, trying http://nothing takes users to the top Google result for the word nothing -- Haughey's blog.

Javascript · 2006/04/30 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Russian Novelist's Biggest Mystery: His Identity

There's an interesting profile in today's San Francisco Chronicle about Grigory Chkhartashvili, a Russian translator and intellectual who was inspired by boredom to start a new career as mystery novelist Boris Akunin, the creator of the kickboxing, czarist-era Russian detective Erast Petrovich Fandorin:

His novels ... wear their period politics lightly. Each plays on a familiar genre. There's the contract killer, the spy and the picaresque swindler. There's a closed-room mystery. And the sixth book features a serial killer, who turns out to be Jack the Ripper, back home in Russia after a stint as a medical student in London. The appeal lies in the quality of the writing, the carefully drawn villains and killers, and the character of Fandorin.

Publishing · 2006/04/30 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Monopoly's 'Inventor' Stole the Game

In a story about Hasbro's plan to remove Atlantic City from Monopoly, the New York Times repeats the thoroughly debunked lie that Charles Darrow invented the game during the Depression:

Charles B. Darrow, an unemployed salesman, sketched the prototype board game on a tablecloth at his home in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, using 21 street names from Atlantic City. (The final space, Marvin Gardens, was a name taken from the neighboring community of Margate City, where it is spelled Marvyn.)

The Parker Brothers game company rejected Mr. Darrow's proposal, so he went to a printer and began selling it himself. It caught on so quickly that Parker Brothers eventually reversed itself. It began mass-marketing Monopoly in 1935, and that year it became the world's best-selling board game.

Versions of Monopoly were played for decades when the game was taught to Darrow, according to the real history. He patented the game, robbed the creators of the credit and the game's publisher fought for 40 years to hide this fact.

Louis Thun, who played the game with the person who taught Darrow in 1931, said, "It wasn't at all clear to me how Mr. Darrow could be the inventor of a game ... we'd played since 1925."

2006/04/30 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

They Call Me Mush Mouth

I live in a ------ apartment that was supposed to be temporary. I work at a job that was also supposed to be temporary until I figured out what I really wanted to do with my life, which apparently is nothing. I have lots of sex, but I haven't had a relationship last more than a couple of months. I don't even have the self-discipline to floss daily. I've had four root canals. Four. I'm thirty-five. I've had four root canals. -- Nate Fisher, Six Feet Under

I loved Six Feet Under until the show jumped the shark when Nate didn't fall in love with his wife Lisa until after she died. From that day onward, the show was an unrelenting series of miseries piled upon the Job-like Fishers and anyone else who had the misfortune to know them. Even on pay cable, that's not entertainment.

Nate Fisher's lament about root canals was my favorite line from the show, because it's such a great way to measure your commitment to personal responsibility.

I was informed by my dentist this morning that I need two root canals, which will be the second and third times I've spent hundreds of dollars to replace nerve tissue with coagulated tree sap. My mouth has become a dental Falluja.

Dentistry · Television · 2006/04/26 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Jason Shellen, Jake Savin Join RSS Advisory Board

The RSS Advisory Board has two new members: Jason Shellen, the product manager of Google Reader and a former strategist for the company that created Blogger, and Jake Savin, the lead developer at UserLand Software.

Jason Shellen has spent three years at Google since the company acquired Blogger developer Pyra Labs.

First launched in October 2005, Google Reader is a free web-based aggregator that reads Really Simple Syndication and all of the other syndication formats, supporting item sharing, tagging, an application programming interface and other features.

Shellen's also a member of the PayPal Developers Network Advisory Board and the Social Software Alliance.

Jake Savin has developed software since 2000 for UserLand, so he's been a part of the company during the four years that it published Really Simple Syndication and helped popularize the format.

He's the cocreator of the weblog publishing tools Manila and Radio UserLand, two of the first commercial programs to support RSS, and a content management system for the publisher of MacWeek, MacWorld and MacCentral magazines.

Savin's also a professional musician who runs a mobile recording studio in Dallas that publishes some of its work as podcasts.

Welcome aboard!

Rss · Podcasting · Music · Google · 2006/04/24 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Sony's Universal Media Disc Format Lays an Egg

Sony PSP games and movies are released on Universal Media Disc format, but the name's a joke. No other devices support the format, Sony won't support burners or third-party efforts to open it up, and Brian Carnell passes along the news that movie studios have now cut back or abandoned UMD releases:

It's hard to see why UMD failed.

The movies were expensive -- $20 to $25 per movie.

The PSP couldn't be connected to a television and there were no standalone UMD players.

The failure should make UMD movies dirt cheap on eBay as Wal-Mart and other large retailers dump their inventory.

I've been interested in failed media formats since discovering deadmedia.org and Bruce Sterling's Dead Media Manifesto, a rumination on the implications for a society that pours so much creative energy into formats that will be lost to the future when there's no devices left to support them.

How long will it be before the much-touted World Wide Web interface is itself a dead medium? And what will become of all those billions of thoughts, words, images and expressions poured onto the Internet? Won't they vanish just like the vile lacquered smoke from a burning pile of junked Victrolas?

Movies · Television · 2006/04/24 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Read More Entries