The Reason for ATOM

It seems to me that folks embrace ATOM mainly to get away from the guy that's credited with inventing RSS:

"I'm not running for president, I am not a corporate executive, and I don't tell bedtime stories to adults unless its for fun and they're friends. I can tell you what it feels like to be me, but I don't know how it feels to be you. I'm willing to listen, up to a point, but unless your site is hosted on weblogs.com, I don't understand why you're hogging the microphone right now. I believe so strongly in the weblog world, that we should be grounded in truth. I think a lot of people participating in this dicussion are not grounded in truth, deliberately so, openly so. Shame on you, I say."

This was said after he pulled down 3000 web sites he was hosting with no notice. ATOM is starting to sound more and more attractive...

Because this post has cauesd Mr. Winer to start swearing at me, I thought I'd remind folks of the following:

DISCLAIMER: This is a personal post of Chris Sells as an individual on my own personal web site and does not reflect the views or Microsoft as a whole or any portion of Microsoft.

With respect, Chris, by all means attack the man for taking down a public service with no notification and for running a service with no service-level agreement. But don't attack RSS because of Winer. Yes, RSS is weakly defined, but what needs to happen is a tidying-up exercise like RFC 2821 (clarifying the SMTP and other Internet e-mail specifications), not a new incompatible specification.

Not that anyone else offers an SLA: Blogger's Terms of Service (http://www.blogger.com/terms.g) states:

4. MODIFICATIONS TO SERVICE Pyra reserves the right to modify or discontinue the Service with or without notice to Member. Pyra shall not be liable to Member or any third party should Pyra exercise BTS right to modify or discontinue the Service.

IOW, Blogger can drop your site with no warning whatsoever. Dave Winer's actually being quite friendly about this.

What does the choice of Atom vs. RSS have to do with whether Dave Winer can continue to host weblogs.com or not? Technological choices shouldn't have anything to do with personal issues, use the best tool for the job is what I always say.

My point was that ATOM was created because folks have trouble with Dave, not because there's anything wrong with RSS. I *love* RSS. RSS 2.0 is extensible and does it's job very well. It's just that with Dave's behavior and association with RSS, it's not too hard to see why folks felt the need to start something new that does essentially the same thing as RSS just to get out from under Dave's shadow.

http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2004/05/28/detente

http://www.cerkit.com/cerkitBlog/PermaLink,guid,102da70a-3ea1-4693-8bb7-139ae3e66289.aspx

"The RSS versus ATOM thing is getting tiresome and it's splintering our solidarity"

Chris, you're a technical guy, so there's no excuse for you repeating the bullshit line that I took down 3000 sites. Get informed, apologize, and then let's discuss it. When there's an outage, we should all work FOR THE USERS, together. When Microsoft has an outage, all our hatred for MS gets pushed aside, and we help your company, for the users, in any way we can. Shame on you -- you're doing the very thing your company is against.

And this has NOTHING to do with Atom or RSS as the other people say. How dare you politicize the outage this way, and how dare you politicize RSS. You're the last of a dying breed Chris. The ill will that formed Atom is the curse of Atom, Sam is right to want to stamp it out (although he needs to work on himself, that detente message contains a lot of Atom marketing bullshit), because it's going to kill Atom to have this extra burden. But here, you're the bad guy Chris, you're the one spreading hate.

Damn right Chris. You seem like a pretty reasonable guy, so it's good that you (rather than some dedicated Winer basher such as Mark Pilgrim) is saying this.

Anyway, when I didn't follow the winer (and friends) vs. everyone else battles, I actually criticized Winer detractors. But if you actually follow what goes on with him, there is no question, none at all, that he is an asshole of the highest degree. He has a persecution complex, and anyone who thinks that a better format than RSS, run by people who believe in consensus rather than (not-so) benevolent dictatorship, must be evil (e.g., Google for daring not to support his brainfucked, 13-incompatible-versions file format).

He is only interested in me, me, me, considers that anyone who doesn't think that RSS is the One True Way, that he is the sole reason people have web logs, anyone who writes anything about web logging without personally mentioning him, or dares to mention that Atom even exists (e.g., in a single article in the Guardian newspaper which was probably read by a few hundred people - Dave is still whining months later), must have some 'Get Dave' agenda.

It's usually a pretty good sign when hundreds of people think you are an asshole that you are.

There is simply no excuse for his behaviour. I have run sites providing content for free, and I have wanted rid, but I have subsidized them simply because by starting the site in the first place I have a moral duty (something Winer obviously doesn't understand) to others. If he can't understand that at least providing an FTP dump, or 2 weeks, one month's notice would be acceptable behaviour, rather than his nutty attempt at headline grabbing, he is far further from understanding why he has so many detractors than I thought possible. He didn't even have the decency to say that his hard drives crashed, or something. He whines about freeloaders, and so on, but doesn't have the brains to attempt to sell them a paid-for account (hint, he is an asshole, and he doesn't have any business sense, otherwise he would do this), just instead engineers another 'I-am-a-nut' publicity stunt.

re Dave's comment:

Chris, you're a technical guy, so there's no excuse for you repeating the bullshit line that I took down 3000 sites. Get informed, apologize, and then let's discuss it.

?????? Have I missed something? I think communication is a very important thing, and let's face it, you are the one with the publicity problem. Chris is a well-respected guy, who I believe has a good image. He is not the one who rightly or wrongly has been said to have taken down 3000 sites (I'm not sure what other spin you can put on this).

It's you Dave, that has the publicity problem, and it's for you Dave to inform people, why the impression that I and Chris (and plenty of others as well) have formed, namely that you pulled the plug on 3000 sites without any notice is wrong.

If you want to inform people, you do that, but don't say that what is being said is not correct, but provide NO EVIDENCE to back up what you are saying. That makes what you are saying the bullshit. You have the problem, so you should do the informing. (And yes, I have taken the time to listen to your 9 minute long mp3 file. The explanation on http://doc.weblogs.com/ (apparently still being hosted) , is that 'this weekend Dave found he couldn't afford to continue hosting them.'. Oh wow, must be tough to stop being able to afford something over the weekend.

Don't you recognize that you have any kind of moral obligation to behave in a reasonable way (your arguments that people wouldn't read notices (even if one person reads it, it's more reasonable)), and you would get accused of spamming for sending out emails (yeah right, 'Your website is being shut down' really counts as spam), are so pathetically specious: you are basically claiming that because you can't guarantee to inform everyone, you don't give a shit about informing anyone).


>>>When there's an outage, we should all work FOR THE USERS, together. When Microsoft has an outage, all our hatred for MS gets pushed aside, and we help your company, for the users, in any way we can. Shame on you -- you're doing the very thing your company is against.


No, this is a different case. Microsoft has never deliberately turned off a website. You are absolutely not working for any users, because you have just screwed them over without bothering to tell them (perhaps the lawyers at Harvard can teach you something about constructing a better argument than 'because I can't inform everyone, I won't inform anyone).

Thanks Dave, but your 'I'm being persecuted by Chris', and 'Chris works at Microsoft, so this is unfair to me' arguments just don't wash.

Last one:

> And this has NOTHING to do with Atom or RSS as the other people say. How dare you politicize the outage this way, and how dare you politicize RSS. You're the last of a dying breed Chris.

Wrong wrong wrong. This is why I told you that you really need to sort out your own image problem before criticizing others. Perhaps if this was posted on mark pilgrim's site, or some other winer-hater, I could understand it, but the fact is

site:sellsbrothers.com atom

returns zero hits.

Chris is not a member of a dying breed, because he isn't a member of the breed at all. He has not posted anything about Atom at all. The problem is yours, and the fact that someone who has never even mentioned Atom before, and apparently doesn't care, has felt fit to join the debate at this stage, just shows the extent to which *your personality* hurts RSS (more than its irritating but not life-threatening (there are a lot of kludgey technologies in the world) deficiencies.

Dave, I don’t have any trouble with you putting your health first, tearing down your servers and walking away from everything causing you unhappiness. In fact, I consider that a mature, healthy thing to do.

Doing it with no warning is where I have the issue. Or even if you had done it with no warning but posted your regrets with an explanation, I’d have applauded you. On the other hand, posting a public berating was over the line, imo and it caused me to gain insight into the motivation behind ATOM. I believe that it’s this kind of approach to things that caused the ATOM effort to start and not any real technical issues with RSS (of which I’m a big fan). Frankly, I consider this kind of behavior self-destructive and I hope you learn to manage it, as you’ve got a lot of power to do good in this industry.

Also, if you could keep the swearing and name calling to a minimum, I'd appreciate it. This is a a forum with no moderation and I depend on the contributors to keep things professional. Thank you.

Congrats, Chris. Granted, being sworn at by Dave Winer is not a terribly exclusive club, but it's always nice to welcome another member. I (and probably most of your other readers who have any clue about syndication formats) understood your original point perfectly.

which part of the ATOM spec says we will all get free hosting forever? I'll admit I haven't followed atom-syntax closely. weblogs.com was great and now it's over . Thanks Dave. 4 great years, more to come.

No part of ATOM or RSS says anything about free hosting. No one has to provide free hosting. But if one does and wishes to stop, one should notify ones customers rather than just shutting down. This post is about attitude, not entitlement.

BTW, Dave, if you're reading this and made it this far, have you changed your mind about earlier requests that the New York Times keep their URLs working forever?

Dave Winer?

He should be named Dave WEINER!

Ah a great nerd battle. Chris was the clear winner, Dave your very post proved Chris's point, you are indeed the loser. GO CHRIS!

m --
customers? The users of weblogs were not customers. (eg "One that BUYS goods or services") They were enjoying a great service that the man who put weblogging on the map provided for free.
It wasn't a place to run a business and its brief outage doesn't cost anyone her livelihood. It was a site with cat pictures and PL discussions. People were seperated from their (free-hosted) cat pictures for a couple days. Now, they get a backup of the site and another 90 days of free lunch.

Explain again how 4 years of free hosting, a 4 day outage, a backup, and 90 days of free hosting makes Dave a bad guy?

zeze,

its Dave's attitude that’s the problem.

either you did not read Chris’s response or you just have poor reading comprehension skills, because Chris made the point clearly that Dave has an attitude problem. Chris quoted him from his website, then Dave even responded filled with anger with expletives.

My understanding was that the weblogs.com free hosting service went down on its own (ie: crashed) due to excessive server load, and instead of spending more of his money to purchase more servers (and time to install, configure, code, etc.), he decided to work with other providers to take over the hosting.

What this has to do with RSS or ATOM is beyond me. Even if you don't like him personally, which is clear, you can't force the guy to spend tens of thousands of his own dollars to upgrade servers for a free service.

Especially since he is in the process of moving from Boston to NYC, and especially since he has new health problems to deal with.

Perhaps what people need to do is stop attacking people without having all the facts. Just a tiny suggestion.

(And Chris, I've been following your spout for a long time. I'm surprised you allowed yourself to fight Sam & Mark's battle for them. It doesn't matter if you claim you are not speaking for MS, your job is to speak for MS as an evangelist and you cannot selectively turn that on or off.)

"your job is to speak for MS as an evangelist"

This is his personal website, he can write whatever he feels. Who are you to tell him what his job is?

Just because someone works for MS doesn't mean they now are now souless drones forever destined to walk the planet evangelizing.

Chris nailed this one on the head. While I am willing and have a tendency to feel sorry for anyone going through hard personal health times (been there, done that), and while I am okay with the fact that Dave should be able to stop providing free service for whatever reason he wants, including in order to best take care of his own needs, I think there are a few things that are pretty well accepted:

First, it would have been a much better situation had some sort of notice been provided or if the data from the 3000 weblogs had been housed somewhere for immediate access.

Second, Dave's pretty well-known for his controversy in the form of opinions, language, impersonal approach and attitude, so none of this should come as a big surprise.

Third, ATOM is - at least in part - around today because its community of creators wanted to do something more flexible and more open (in terms of ownership) than was happening with RSS.

Chris talks about ATOM not because he wants to politicize the issue - Dave does that just fine on his own. Chris' point seems to be that the political situation is one *other* example of what happens when people choose to play the role of the bull in the china shop. That's my take, anyhow, and maybe Chris can correct me if I am wrong.

I also love RSS, and I am just fine with ATOM. I just want something that *works* and meets my needs. I think being *overly* religious about which standard to use is bad, and I think that believing there should be no standards is completely idiotic. I think standards should exist, should be clear and relatively easy to use, and should be held in the hands of groups of reasonable people, with no one person having enough power to overrule or bully the rest. Else we end up with non-standard standards and people start complaining about what's broken, whether it be the technology or the process. Sound familiar?

I also think Dave made some fast, fairly brutal and self-motivated decisions this past weekend. The kind of decisions that people make either when they have to worry about themselves in the middle of a crisis or when they have the personality of a charging bull. Or both.

I'm glad to see that Dave is working hard with others to get the blog data available temporarily on other systems, sooner than he originally indicated.

But again, none of this is new, and ultimately Dave has the right to pull all the plugs and shoot himself in the foot if he really wants to. Some people have to hit bottom a few times before they see the light. That's ok. It's unfortunate, difficult to watch, and even more difficult to tolerate, but it's ok.

"Just because someone works for MS doesn't mean they now are now souless drones forever destined to walk the planet evangelizing."

I agree that everyone is generally entitled to their own opinion and nothing anyone says represents their employers views. But there has to be a limit. I mean, surely there are SOME things Chris wouldn't say on his personal blog. Chris the MS evangelist cannot separate himself too far from Chris the personal blogger.

If you take John's reasoning to its ultimate conclusion, then Bill Gates himself should be free to say bad things about some technology and claim "I'm just speaking on behalf of myself". Don't you think Bill Gates knows he has to be careful what he says in public?

Or perhaps President George Bush can call Wolf Blitzer a nasty name, and claim he is only speaking for himself and not his administration. When the President speaks, the government speaks.

I find it a bit disingenuous when people like Chris Sells and Robert Scoble, who are the two most well-known "official Microsoft bloggers", take pot shots at one technology for reasons other than the technology itself.

Just as I don't like it when Scoble says bad things about ATOM, I also don't like to see Sells making disparaging remarks about RSS. I notice Scoble has wisely stopped getting involved in this nasty fight for a few weeks now (since Dare asked him to tone it down). Sells should follow his lead.

Again, there's nothing wrong with RSS. I'm a big fan of RSS. In fact, I didn't understand the need for ATOM at all 'til this incident. The insight was that it wasn't about the RSS technology at all that caused ATOM to be created.

Quoting Dave Winer on June 17,2004:
"When Microsoft has an outage, all OUR hatred for MS gets pushed aside"

Please start speaking just for yourself Dave.... not everyone is an anti-Microsoft zealot with a personal jihad.

Funny -- after I posted something about weblogs.com going off the air, Dave sent me nasty personal e-mail, too. I'm so pleased to be part of the club.

Welcome, Brother Eric. : )