RSSCloud Should Not Be Controlled by One Person

I posted a call for comments last night on RSS-Public, the mailing list of the RSS Advisory Board, asking what people think the board should do in response to the ongoing effort to revise the RSSCloud Interface.

The interface has been a part of the RSS specification since the publication of RSS 0.92 in December 2000. It determines how software can use the cloud element in an RSS feed to connect to a server that offers real-time notifications when the feed has been updated. In a nutshell, here's how it works:

• A user subscribes to an RSS feed that has a cloud element which identifies its cloud server.
• The user's RSS reader contacts the cloud server, asking to be notified when the feed is updated.
• When the feed has been updated, the software publishing the feed sends a ping to the cloud server.
• The cloud server sends a notification to the IP address of all RSS readers that asked for updates.
• The RSS readers immediately request the feed.

Cloud communications can be sent using XML-RPC, SOAP or REST aside from pings, which are sent using XML-RPC.

Dave Winer recently began an effort to revise RSSCloud, persuading WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg to adopt the still-in-progress proposal on all 7.5 million blogs hosted on WordPress.Com. Winer has made three significant changes to the interface.

First, he changed the fifth parameter of a notification request on the REST interface to a series of named url parameters (url1, url2, and so on upwards), each containing the URL of a feed monitored by the cloud.

Next, he added a new ping format to contact cloud servers using REST.

Finally, he has proposed adding a sixth parameter to the notification request, but only for REST requests. The sixth parameter, called domain, identifies a server that will receive notification updates from the cloud server. It's an alternative to using the IP address for notifications.

Winer, the lead author of several versions of the RSS specification and one of the best-known authorities on syndication, is making these changes unilaterally.

Because RSSCloud has been a part of RSS for nine years, I thought it wise for the board to decide what, if anything, it should do regarding this effort. My personal belief is that it's extremely unwise to give a single developer the authority to revise this interface and author its specification.

Ideally, a group should decide what changes should be made to the next version of RSSCloud. This group could be the RSS Advisory Board, which deliberates in public and has 10 members from across the RSS development community, or it could be an ad-hoc group formed strictly to work on the effort.

As a member of the board for five years, I've had a lot of experience dealing with the consequences of a specification process that is closed to public participation and drafted with imprecise language. It leads to situations like the long-running battle over the enclosure element, which carries podcasting files and other multimedia over RSS. As described in the board's RSS Best Practices Profile, the RSS specification doesn't make clear whether an item can contain more than one enclosure. Developers disagree over what the specification means, so interoperability suffers as some allow more than one enclosure and others don't.

I realize that I'm tilting at windmills to suggest that Winer let the RSS Advisory Board get anywhere near the effort. Jon and Kate have a better chance of getting together. But as developers such as Mullenweg implement RSSCloud, they should insist that the revision process take place in public and involve a group of software developers and feed publishers who have the power to approve or reject each change. The group should write the specification together.

Letting Winer make all the decisions by fiat will just buy years of arguments over what his spec means and why no one should ever be allowed to change it.

Related post:

• According to PubSubHubbub developer Brad Fitzpatrick, Winer has said that RssCloud "is frozen and a 'done deal'."

Rss · Programming · Pubsub · 2009/09/15 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

World's Oldest Person Dies, Takes 1894 With Her

Gertude Baines died yesterday at the age of 115 years and 148 days. She was the world's oldest person and the 16th oldest ever, according to a cool table prepared by longevity geeks on Wikipedia. Baines, born April 6, 1894, was the grandchild of slaves who worked as a maid at Ohio State University dorms until her retirement to a Los Angeles nursing home a decade ago. She was a non-drinker and non-smoker who once told a reporter, "I did not have a lot of fun as an adult but I enjoyed going to church every Sunday." She was hoping to live long enough to vote for President Obama again in 2012.

Upon her death, the oldest known person becomes Kama Chinen of Okinawa, Japan, an island that has the highest percentage of centenarians in the world. Sixty-seven of every 100,000 Okinawans is over 100.

The line of oblivion, the starting date for the living history of the world, moves forward 13 months to Chinen's birthday on May 10, 1895.

There's no longer a person around who could have witnessed the revival of the Olympics after 1,500 years (June 23, 1894), crossed the newly opened Tower Bridge in London (June 30, 1894), or lived through the First Sino Japanese War (August 1, 1894 to April 17, 1895). There also are no fans of the soccer team Manchester City FC who can say they've followed the Blues since day one (April 16, 1894).

Baines was the last person who could have hung out with assassinated French President Marie Francois Sadi Carnot (died June 25, 1894), the author Robert Louis Stevenson (Dec. 3, 1894) or Charles Frederick Worth, the British fashion designer who created Haute Couture (March 10, 1895).

Her lifespan reached from the death of abolitionist Frederick Douglass on Feb. 20, 1895, to the inauguration of the first black president on Jan. 20, 2009.

Writing this post gave me a theory about how sports columnist Mark Whicker could have penned that odious Jaycee Dugard column while being blind to its insensitivity. Whicker, a columnist for more than 22 years, writes 200 columns a year. That's an enormous word beast to feed, and you can't fill it up without developing some odd predilections that give you something to write about when the inspiration cupboard is bare. Whicker used the same gimmick in a 1991 column about the release of journalist-turned-hostage Terry Anderson in Lebanon, so he's a guy who obsesses over the sporting events that people miss when they're kidnapped.

As someone who obsesses over the merciless march of time and has filled Workbench with 2,792 posts over almost 10 years, I can to a degree sympathize.

Aging · History · Oblivion · 2009/09/12 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

ESPN Spikes Rob Neyer's Post about Mark Whicker

The web site for ESPN spiked a blog post today by acclaimed baseball writer Rob Neyer in which he appeared to call for Orange County Register sports columnist Mark Whicker to be fired for his widely criticized column making light of Jaycee Dugard's 17 years of captivity at the hands of a sexual predator.

The blog post was submitted at 08:57:40 PST and had been deleted from ESPN's web site by the afternoon, but it was cached by several search engines and could be recreated, aside from some text at the end.

Neyer explained the removal in an email Saturday morning. "At ESPN.com, we have a policy prohibiting media criticism, and I ran afoul of that policy, however unintentional," he said. "Thus, an editor pulled the post from the site. Considering our policy, I could hardly complain."

Here's the text of Neyer's spiked post:

You've probably already read or heard something about maybe the worst sports column, ever. If not, Shysterball's take is a good start (among many, many possibilities).

About all this, my friend Keith Scherer writes:

"Rob, You know I work in criminal law. I deal with murder and molestation and all kinds of human depravity every day, so I have a strong stomach. It takes a lot to repulse me at this point, but the lynch mob that went after Mark Whicker this week made me sick. Worst post ever? Really? Can we not communicate without hyperbole anymore?

"The guy misfired. He used a silly hook to bracket a dull article that his editor should have canned. Maybe it was stupid and maybe it was offensive, but the guy didn't mean any harm, and it's disingenuous for his attackers to imply that he's indifferent to child abduction and rape.

"He and his editor deserved a scolding, perhaps, but to go after him they way the mob's doing it – writing letters, trying to get him fired, publicly humiliating him – is loathsome. It's America at our self-aggrandizing, self-righteous, politically correct worst.

"I don't know anything about this guy, but I'll assume -- because this isn't only about Whicker -- he's like most middle-aged white guys. I'll assume he has a family that loves him and can't understand the hatred being directed at him. He's in a dying profession and I'll assume he's very well aware of it, is scared to death he's going to be out of work soon, with no way to pay his mortgage, pay for groceries, or pay for health insurance for his wife and kids. I'll assume he (like many of us) has few, if any, transferable skills, so that every day is a catastrophe just waiting to happen. His life, like many lives, is hard enough already without a posse of strangers trying to kick him to the curb for a lapse of taste.

"Again, this guy didn't mean any harm. He was careless, thoughtless (it's not the first time he has used this kind of hook), and the article really didn't need to be written in the first place, but he's not a moral monster.

"You know me, and you know I spent years putting child sex offenders in jail. I'm not insensitive to the trauma this child and her family went through, and I'd be among the last to trivialize it. But people need to get a grip. What trivializes trauma is when people put on airs and imagine that they themselves are the victims of things that happen to people they never met.

"To call for his head over this -- that's morally wicked. It seems to me, at this point, he's more sinned against than sinning. I hope his family members have forgiveness in their hearts.

"Keith"

I'm not nearly as charitable as Keith (which is just one of my many failings). But while I agree that it's morally wicked to call for Whicker's head because he has failed, morally, what about calling for his head because he's incompetent?

It's especially easy for me, because I'm infatuated with good writing and I abhor bad writing, and columns like Whicker's give my profession a bad name.

We might reasonable assume that it's the worst Whicker can offer ... but are his best efforts better enough, and frequent enough? Again, I don't know. Nor am I going to know. Only his readers can know. And his editors, who should know him better than anyone. Speaking of whom, Keith Olbermann has reserved his enmity for those editors (here's video; relevant clip begins one minute in, if Olbermann's politics ...

Keith Scherer is a criminal trial attorney and baseball writer who contributed to Neyer's book Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Blunders.

After Mark Whicker's column drew furious criticism from hundreds of readers, bloggers and Twitter users around the globe, he publicly apologized and the newspaper's deputy editor for sports, John Fabris, wrote an apology on behalf of the editors who were responsible for its publication.

In a phone interview with Mallary Jean Tenore of the journalism site Poynter Online that followed the publication of his apology, Whicker continued to maintain that he did not make light of Dugard's tragic story.

"I vehemently believe I wasn't insensitive about the fact that she was kidnapped," he told Tenore. "I never made light about the fact that this woman was abducted. I don't think anyone can cite anything in the column that says I did."

On Thursday, former sports journalist Keith Olbermann called out Orange County Register sports editors David Bean, Todd Harmonson and Keith Sharon during the "Worst Person in the World" segment for green-lighting Whicker's column.

Olbermann said, "At least once a career, no matter how good, every columnist, every commentator, will write something so bad, so inappropriate the editors just have to kill it. Mr. Bean, Mr. Harmonson and Mr. Sharon failed to do this. The usually thoughtful Mark Whicker, 22 years at that paper, went tone deaf. ... Mark Whicker will take his lumps for this, deservedly so ... But you're the guys reading this deciding whether or not it gets published, and you say 'great'? You are in over your head, gentlemen."

Update: An earlier version of this story made it appear that Whicker said the "fast-moving, quick-to-judge culture of the web" was to blame for the reaction to his column. Those words were Tenore paraphrasing her interview with Whicker, not a phrase he used. I apologize for the error.

Sports · Journalism · Crime · 2009/09/12 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Sportswriter Mark Whicker Makes Light of Dugard Kidnapping

On Tuesday, Orange County Register sportswriter Mark Whicker used Jaycee Dugard's 17 years of captivity at the hands of a sexual predator as a premise for a light-hearted sports column. The result may be the most astonishingly tasteless thing I've ever read in a newspaper. Here's how Whicker starts:

It doesn't sound as if Jaycee Dugard got to see a sports page.

Box scores were not available to her from June 10, 1991 until Aug. 31 of this year.

She never saw a highlight. Never got to the ballpark for Beach Towel Night. Probably hasn't high-fived in a while.

She was not allowed to spike a volleyball. Or pitch a softball. Or smack a forehand down the line. Or run in a 5-footer for double bogey.

Now, that's deprivation. ...

The column runs down the sports events, figures and trends that Dugard might have missed while she was being held captive, repeatedly raped as a young child and gave birth to two children by her abuser. Whicker ends with a play on words about her escape:

And ballplayers, who always invent the slang no matter what ESPN would have you believe, came up with an expression for a home run that you might appreciate.

Congratulations, Jaycee. You left the yard.

In the 48 hours since publication, the column has drawn widespread outrage from bloggers, Twitter users and readers of his newspaper.

"This is quite possibly the worst sports column ever written," Matt Welch declared on Reason.

"I can't decide what's worse about this column, the premise or the kicker at the end. The thing is, Mark Whicker is one of the most underrated columnists in the country. Not sure what he was thinking with this one," Boston Globe sportswriter Chad Finn wrote on Twitter.

Greg Simons, a commenter to the weblog Shysterball, claimed he got a response from Whicker to his email complaint. Simons called the column the "most revolting hook I've ever read" and asked Whicker if his next column would be about 9/11.

According to Simons, Whicker responded, "The revolting thing is that you would equate a column that celebrates the release of Jaycee Dugard, and tries to put the length of her 18-year kidnapping in a context that everyone can understand, with a terrorist attack that killed 3,000 people. And then you draw a value judgment about me based on such a preposterous parallel."

Whicker, a sportswriter for more than 27 years and a longtime columnist at the Register, describes himself as a "wary refugee in tech-land" on his Twitter account mwhicker, where his updates are protected from view.

Jason Fry, author of the Reinventing the Newsroom blog, says of the column, "Sometimes we all need to be told, 'This isn't running. One day you'll thank me.'"

Update: Whicker has apologized.

Sports · Journalism · Crime · 2009/09/09 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

There's a Reason RSSCloud Failed to Catch On

WordPress and Dave Winer are working together to bring real-time, Twitter-style updates to RSS feeds using the cloud element and the accompanying RSSCloud Interface. Yesterday, WordPress added RSS cloud support to "all 7.5 million blogs on WordPress.com." Winer's documenting the ongoing work at RSSCloud.org.

Although some tech sites are reporting this as a new initiative, cloud has been around since RSS 0.92 in December 2000. I was getting real-time RSS updates as a Radio UserLand blogger back then, and it was a great feature.

However, there's a reason that UserLand turned off cloud support in its products several years ago and shut down all of its cloud notification servers. The approach has massive scaling and firewall issues.

To explain why, it's worth looking at an example. I publish the Drudge Retort, which has around 16,000 subscribers, including 1,000 who get the feeds using desktop software on their home computers. If I add cloud support and all of my subscribers have cloud-enabled readers, each time I update the Retort, my cloud update server will be sending around 1,050 notifications to computers running RSS readers -- 1,000 to individuals and 50 to web-based readers.

That's just for one update. The Retort updates around 20 times a day, so that requires 21,000 notifications sent using XML-RPC, SOAP or REST.

On Internet servers it's extremely expensive to request data from clients, in terms of CPU time and networking resources. You have to make a connection to the computer, wait for a response and deal with timeouts from servers that are unavailable or blocked by a firewall.

RSSCloud also requires that all desktop software receiving cloud notifications functions as a web server. So if an RSS reader like BottomFeeder or FeedDemon adds cloud support, it must show its users how to turn off firewall ports to accept these incoming requests and possibly turn them off in their router as well. UserLand's attempt to put web servers on user desktops failed because it was too cumbersome to support. Back when I was writing the book Radio UserLand Kick Start and working closely with UserLand developers, their biggest customer service issue was helping users open up their firewalls so that Radio UserLand could act as a web server.

I don't mean to be a dark cloud, because this functionality could be a nice improvement for web-based RSS readers, letting services like Google Reader and Bloglines receive much quicker updates than they get from hourly polling.

But if the effort to make RSS real time extends to desktop software and mobile clients, cloud won't work. I think that RSS update notification would require peer-to-peer technology and something like XMPP, the protocol that powers Jabber instant messaging.

Rss · Programming · Pubsub · 2009/09/08 · 32 COMMENTS · Link

Obama's Speech to Schools No Reason to Freak Out

The lead story in today's St. Augustine Record feeds the hysteria over President Obama's planned speech to the nation's schoolchildren Tuesday. "Parents may pull kids from Obama talk," the headline reads, "Some St. Johns parents fear political message." Instead of covering what Obama's going to say to students, which will be a non-partisan call for kids to study, do homework and help the country by bettering themselves educationally, the Record leads with idiotic spin from Florida Republican Party chairman Jim Greer, who claims without any evidence that "taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology."

Aside from a comment by the White House press secretary calling it "silly season when the president of the United States can't tell kids in school to study hard and stay in school," reporter Marcia Lane doesn't quote a single person to explain or defend the speech. Instead, she quotes Greer, the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition, a Republican school superintendent in Arizona, unnamed critics and St. Johns County School Superintendent Joe Joyner, who acts as if an attempt was made to sneak this event past him. Neither this story nor others I've read mentions the fact that past presidents also addressed schoolchildren.

I'm a St. Johns parent, and I fear a country that has become so cynical about politics that people don't trust the president to give a speech to schoolkids, simply because they voted for the other party.

I don't know what it is about President Obama that inspires such irrational panic among Republicans. Whether it's the scope of federal intervention in the nation's massive economic crisis, the presence of the first liberal president in the White House in 28 years, the endless stream of opportunistic attacks by the still-formidable right-wing media machine or discomfort over his race and background, Obama faces so much mistrust in everything he does that I fear the country is becoming ungovernable.

On the Drudge Retort, Yav did a good job today of running down all the false, misleading or crazy stuff that's been flung at the president lately:

• Death panels.
• Pull the plug on Grandma.
• Death panels for the disabled.
• Forced euthanasia for our Veterans.
• Breast cancer patients to be killed off.
• Obama's a socialist. No, he's a marxist.
• He's a radical christian. No he's a secret muslim.
• He's actually a Kenyan, not a U.S. Citizen.
• He's an illegal alien.
• He's coming for our guns.
• He's implementing a civil military force.
• He's going to indoctrinate our children.

Every week there's something new that cycles through the Drudge Report, bloggers like Michelle Malkin, radio gasbags like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, each outlet amplifying the last one until it's another "major controversy" that tells the right wing what they want to hear -- which is that they were right all along about Obama. Work people into a lather, rinse and repeat.

Although I describe myself as a "yellow-dog Democrat," I've always tried to take an open-minded approach to politics and be receptive to other viewpoints. That's one reason the Retort has more conservative and libertarian members than other liberal political sites. But these days, it's hard to take anything coming from Republicans seriously because there's such a flood of BS coming from Obama haters.

Political consensus requires an assumption of good faith. The approach many Republicans are taking to Obama's presidency, in which every single thing he does is portrayed in the worst possible light, is extremely destructive to the well-being of this country because it makes consensus impossible. There will be a Republican president in the White House soon enough. The approach being taken today against Obama will be used against his successor. Obama and the Democratic leaders of Congress will stop looking for common ground with people who believe they want to kill grandmothers and the disabled, set up FEMA detention camps and turn the nation into North Cuba. You can't compromise with crazy.

Politics · Education · Hysteria · 2009/09/05 · 34 COMMENTS · Link

Gawker Takes Shots at Company's Early Skeptics

In a post bragging about how great Gawker Media is doing, company marketing strategist Erin Pettigrew takes shots at a few bloggers who were skeptical seven years ago that a professional weblog network would make money:

... when the controversial Gizmodo launched (laying the foundation for Gawker Media), the self-important digital punditocracy debated this 'commercial experiment' in blogging as a viable, interesting, useful, or scalable business:

Dave Winer: It's such a stale idea. The Web is distributed. Try to get the flow to coalesce in a premeditated way. Not likely to work.

Anil Dash: Will it be profitable? I think it's possible but it's much more likely to break even long-term. Which, for the publishing industry, ain't too bad.

Matt Haughey: It's still too new of a site, but I'm looking forward to seeing how well written it is, and if it keeps me coming back. If so, and it makes the people behind it money while doing it, maybe professional blogging can work afterall.

It's fun to look back at those comments, but calling the bloggers "self-important" suggests that Gawker has been nursing a grudge all this time, which is weird considering the tone of the comments that were quoted. Most people were skeptical back then that a pro blog network could work. This was a good thing for Nick Denton's company, because otherwise he would've faced more early competition.

Gawker's also the last place in the world that should be offended by critical bloggers, considering the hard-edged writing that typifies its blogs. The Gawker Media empire is fueled by snark, cheap shots and venom. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Tech · Blogging · Self Importance · 2009/09/03 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

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