Scripting News Readers' Dinner Held in NYC
Wednesday night, Dave Winer held a dinner for readers of his Scripting News Web Site. The dinner took place at Katz's Deli, a Jewish Deli with "atmosphere" on the Lower East Side of NYC.
Just as Scripting News is interesting its ecelectic mix of issues, the conversation at the dinner ran the gamut from the World Series to the RSS 1.0 standardization effort.
Summary of the major issues:
- RSS 1.0: A good deal of the discussion at this dinner meeting revolved around RSS 1.0, a proposed extension to the RSS 0.9x content syndication standard. Dave Winer has been a vocal critic of that effort, and many of the participants agreed with him. Although we would like to do a more comprehensive analysis of RSS, a summary of CTDATA's position is that we feel that the RSS 1.0 proposal is more complex than we would like and was developed without the consensus of some of the major RSS users and developers.
- Radio Userland: This is a music-oriented Weblog development and community building tool. It seems to be a hybrid of Weblog and Napster-like functionality. Dave Winer said he began developing the product because he believed that the U.S. Federal Courts would put Napster out of business this past Summer. A lot of the diners had worked with Radio Userland extensively, and it was clear that Dave Winer felt that this was one of the more interesting projects that he had worked on in his long career.
- Adam Curry: Adam Curry was not an issue at the dinner, but he did attend the dinner and express some of his ideas about a personal server product that he would like to see. For those who do not remember, Adam Curry is known in the United States primarily for his work on MTV. However, he is an experienced business person with a good eye for technology. His work is worth following.
- Creating Trading Markets in Bandwidth and Processing Power: One of the ideas that came up in the discussion was the idea of being able to harness the bandwidth or processing power of other Internet users who are not currently on-line. This was an idea brought up by Dave Winer, just to see if people felt that the idea had any potential beyond SETI@Home.