Marc's Voice

Back in Boca, heading to Cleveland

My vacation is over and it’s time to get to work.  I’m excited about starting my class and following up on all the opportunities, connects and new alliances we’re forming in NEO.  Don’t know what NEO stands for?  You will!

Dave Winer tells the story of the birth of RSS. He brings up that it was Netscape that enabled and created RSS.  But I remember it slightly differently.  By 1999 Netscape was gone, irrelevant, a non-issue.  They had lost the browser battles to Microsoft, their enterprise play had fizzled, Netscape 4 was a joke and it was Yahoo, Amazon and eBay that were the stars of the  Internet.

Netscape’s valuation had plummeted, their marketshare evaporated, it’s all-stars were leaving and the sale to AOL was eminent.  So coming up with MyNetscape (or whatever it was called) and the associated RSS format was ignored by most - except for Dave.  I know - I was sitting there right next to him when he discovered it.

He took his ’scriptingNews’ format, glued it to the mechanism of RSS .90 and gave birth to RSS .91.  THAT was the  birth of RSS.  What then followed were 3-4 years of tireless evangelism by Dave - which is completely missed in things like wikipedia and the revisionist history that seems to dominate the ‘open web’ mythos.

Anyway - I still don’t trust Marc Andreessen.

Congrats to iLike for launching their own music download store!

I agree with Anil that the .gov sites have been kicking ass. I myself especially like the DOD Web 2.0 Guidance Forum- and their DODTechipedia efforts.

Russian sand painting- must watch video…..

I can’t wait for USB 3.0!

Congrats to Susan Kare’s brother Jordin - on his work on the Space Elevator!

Heading back to Puerta Vallarta for lunch tomorrow. It’s in Key Largo. Every single thing they cooked there - rocked!