Is there an Echo in here?

The lat­est in weblog­land is the dis­cus­sions sur­round­ing Echo, a new for­mat for weblogs. While the idea ini­tially sounds good (“hey, a new for­mat… that shows progress”), I’m not sure of the gen­eral direc­tion. There are a num­ber of ques­tion sur­round­ing the effort.

While the weblog world is gen­er­ally very insu­lar (think­ing of blogs as a dif­fer­ent beast from the rest of the web), the con­cepts sur­round­ing a weblog are noth­ing new in terms of pub­lish­ing. Basi­cally, a blog is a tool that allows to pub­lish con­tent eas­ily and presents it in a par­tic­u­lar fash­ion (gen­er­ally as a set of entries pre­sented in reverse chrono­log­i­cal order).

echo: the new RSS?

Part of the suc­cess of weblogs stems from the fact that they are gen­er­ally offer­ing syn­di­ca­tion capa­bil­i­ties using one of the many fla­vors of RSS, a for­mat first devel­oped by Netscape, and then extended by Dave Winer. In 2000, a rift in the RSS com­mu­nity cre­ated two diver­gent stan­dards, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0. RSS 1.0 was devel­oped as a light­weight mul­ti­pur­pose exten­si­ble meta­data descrip­tion and syn­di­ca­tion for­mat. It sounds sus­pi­ciously like what the echo crowd is try­ing to do and makes the name almost pre­scient (as in “is echo just an echo of RSS 1.0″)

Accord­ing to the echo roadmap wiki, echo is a new weblog for­mat (Echo) that is:

• 100% ven­dor neutral,
• imple­mented by everybody,
• freely exten­si­ble by any­body, and
• cleanly and thor­oughly specified.

I find this inter­est­ing as those were some of the goals of RSS 1.0.

So the ques­tion remains as to whether devel­op­ing a new stan­dard from the ground up makes sense when other exten­si­ble stan­dards are avail­able and could be extended to meet new requirements.

echo is for entries?

How­ever, echo stands for more than just syn­di­ca­tion. As part of the model, there seems to be a clear drive to define what an entry is. Other efforts like newsML and ICE seem to be going after the same goals. When it comes down to it, an entry in a weblog is not that much dif­fer­ent from an arti­cle or other piece of con­tent. To come up with a new for­mat will only fur­ther the insu­la­tion of the blog world from the rest of the world. Why not use and extend some of the appro­pri­ate formats?

echo is vendor-neutral?

This one actu­ally amuses me. No suc­cess­ful stan­dard has ever been ven­dor neu­tral. Even the cur­rent iter­a­tions of such web stan­dards as HTML and CSS were born out of the will of larger play­ers in the stan­dard groups. To assume that a stan­dard will ever be ven­dor neu­tral is like say­ing that alco­hol is not bad for you. It may seem true on the sur­face but deep in the bow­els of stan­dard groups, ven­dors yield a tremen­dous amount of power. If, for exam­ple, one of the largest play­ers in the blog tool world says that the for­mat should head one way, that player will be lis­tened to. If a smaller player makes the same sug­ges­tion, peo­ple will look to the largest player for ini­tial appro­ba­tion. It’s basic human nature.

echo will not be political

I wish I could share in the enthu­si­asm of the echo founders regard­ing this. How­ever, sooner or later, I sus­pect it will get polit­i­cal. Stan­dards groups always do and I fail to see how the echo world will be dif­fer­ent. Even­tu­ally, some­thing con­tro­ver­sial will hap­pen and every­one will look to Sam Ruby to make the call, as he was the one to set up the wiki. At that point, Sam will make some peo­ple unhappy. They’ll yell that it’s all because Sam is a tool of the other group and it will quickly degen­er­ate from there. I hope I’m wrong on this and wish the best to all involved.

On sup­port­ing Echo

If some­thing good comes out of it, I will even­tu­ally sup­port echo. No, let me rephrase that, I will def­i­nitely sup­port echo (I do, after all, sup­port all the other major blog syn­di­ca­tion for­mats out there) but am not sure of what will hap­pen with it mov­ing for­ward. I hope that some­thing good will come out of it and only want to high­light that there are a few things to look at before think­ing of build­ing a new world.