From David to Dave

The New York Times has an inter­est­ing arti­cle over a fight about how to best clean Michelangelo’s David. It’s an inter­est­ing study of how tech­nol­ogy some­times clashes with more tra­di­tion­al­ist approaches. In our rush to use tech­nol­ogy for every­thing, it is inter­est­ing to stop and pon­der whether it is the right tool for the job.

Often, geeks like myself tend to jump on tech­nol­ogy for technology’s sake. An exam­ple of this is the recent hub­bub over (n)echo, which has left many peo­ple won­der­ing whether RSS is bro­ken. The truth is that it isn’t and that what­ever new for­mat comes up will live nicely in par­al­lel to RSS for years to come.

When esti­mat­ing tech­nol­ogy, one should ask himself/herself whether it is the right tool for the job. I could write a cal­cu­la­tor pro­gram to cal­cu­late the sum of one and one but that does not mean that I should (espe­cially on such a small thing). So why is it that we get so blinded by tech­nol­ogy? Why is it that the old axiom “to some­one with a ham­mer, every­thing looks like a nail” holds true so often when it comes to tech­nol­ogy projects?

Part of it is what I would call insti­tu­tional blind­ness. It is the kind of thing that sits at the source of most of the big con­flicts in the tech­nol­ogy space: plat­form wars like Win­dows vs. Mac, Win­dows vs. Linux, Inter­net Explorer vs. Netscape, RSS vs. (n)echo are often rooted into a set view of how the world is, not how it could be. Some of the most vocal peo­ple in those dis­cus­sions are set on a par­tic­u­lar approach and refuse to see the value in the other way.

For exam­ple, I’ve recently made the switch from Microsoft win­dows to Linux as the under­ly­ing oper­at­ing sys­tem for TNL.net. There was no acri­mony on my part regard­ing Microsoft. I think Microsoft is a good com­pany when it comes to build­ing desk­top oper­at­ing sys­tems that peo­ple use. While many assign sin­is­ter motives to Microsoft moves, I do not believe that the com­pany is inher­ently evil. What I do believe is that the com­pany has a cer­tain view of com­put­ing and that this view no longer aligns with my own. Com­pa­nies, in and of them­selves, do not have any motives. They are merely legal enti­ties cre­ated to mar­ket prod­ucts and services.

The same can be said of projects. Many peo­ple are say­ing that Dave Winer is inflex­i­ble in his stew­ard­ship of RSS. How­ever, what they fail to real­ize is that, while Dave did come up with the ini­tial RSS 2.0 spec­i­fi­ca­tion, he specif­i­cally said that

while these copy­right restric­tions apply to the writ­ten RSS spec­i­fi­ca­tion, no claim of own­er­ship is made by User­Land to the for­mat it describes

By doing so, he essen­tially gave any­one a right to extend RSS. So why come up with another for­mat? And why fight over it?

It seems to me that the dis­cus­sions over the restora­tion of David are no more aca­d­e­mic than the recent dis­cus­sions over RSS and (n)echo. In both cases, we have peo­ple who have done some great work. In both cases, we have dis­agree­ment as to how to move for­ward. In both cases, we will end up with some­thing that will leave some peo­ple unhappy.

How­ever, in the case of online syn­di­ca­tion, unlike in restora­tion, there is a way to have your cake and eat it too. Based on my cur­sory expe­ri­ence of (n)echo to date, I am not yet see­ing much value. I do know, how­ever, that RSS is dri­ving large amounts of traf­fic to my site, and thus, helps me have inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions with a lot of peo­ple. RSS 2.0 is highly exten­si­ble, if that’s what you want. Some peo­ple say it is stuck but I can’t help but think that it is they who are stuck. Stuck on per­sonal con­flicts that, in the end, accom­plish lit­tle in terms of mov­ing stan­dards for­ward but end up irri­tat­ing every­one (while Dave and I do not always agree on imple­men­ta­tion, and while I have often been on the receiv­ing end of some of his flames, I do value his tech­ni­cal input and his past accom­plish­ments. At the same time, I am will­ing to go with what I feel is right, whether he or any­one else agrees (as can be attested from my own offer­ing of RSS 1.0 feeds on the TNL.net site))

The ques­tion to all par­tic­i­pants in the cur­rent RSS/(n)echo flame wars (as this entry is largely tar­geted at them) is where is the value? and will your for­mat stand in the long run. I sus­pect RSS will be in use for years to come. I also sus­pect that, for the most part, it will change. I do believe that all those involved in this fight need to take some time off and fig­ure out what is best for the for­mat. Sure, peo­ple can make fun and attack each other but how does that help any­one? At the end of the day, I wish that we all had a Ruby fil­ter in all our discussions.