Simon Willison’s Weblog

Throwing your money around

Adam Curry is a dangerous man: He’s throwing $10,000 at a problem he clearly doesn’t understand. Quote from June 29th:

I wonder if netscape came up with the Really Simple Syndication when they hijacked the name for what they called rss1.0.

Anyone who’s been following RSS even a little bit should know that Netscape had absolutely nothing to do with RSS 1.0—they defined RSS 0.91 and that was it. Netscape certainly didn’t hijack the name, and it was Dave Winer who came up with “Really Simple Syndication”.

Despite questionable understanding of the situation, Adam is taking a stand by promising to spread $10,000 around in payments to aggregator authors to include him as a default feed, but only if they omit support for (N)Echo. As Rafe Colburn points out, even if you assume a complete understanding of the issues behind the creation of (N)Echo, this simply doesn’t make sense.