Dave Winer

They work, but they all had paper cuts.

We've talked before about how WebSub, which is really just a rename of PubSubHubbub, because why would you not rename that horrible thing? But WebSub was a similar to a thing called RSS Cloud, which Dave Winer pioneered back in the day, and then- WebSub kind of took those ideas and fleshed them out a little bit more, made it a little bit more generic, and became a fairly robust open standard, and then there was a WebSub 2, but I don't think anybody really adopted that.

But WebSub was an attempt to solve the RSS feed updating problem, generally speaking, not just for podcasting.

So if you had an RSS feed that updated with a new item or some other change to it, how do you let all your n- subscribers know that there's a change, that they need to go and pull the RSS feed again? So WebSub tried to do that by making a sort of registration server.

We were still, a lot of places are still locked down, and, uh, looking back and with hindsight of how things played out after that, I think what we saw at the time was more of, more of just a s- a sign of the psyche of the modern world, probably more than an indicator of anything else, of some sort of long-term problem.

But what we were seeing at the time was podcasts getting delisted out of various directories, and that's really bothersome bec- and Adam took it, Adam takes those things personally.

He was one of the, him and Dave Winer co-invented podcasting, and from a technical standpoint, he ran the first podcast directory, iPodder, and that beca- iPodder became the seed directory for what is now Apple Podcast Directory.

So there's, I think he took those things personally and said, "This is not what I want.

And so the Internet winds up becoming a copy of this cabal network network.

structure and so what I think we're involved in right now is that they built this thing with the intention of controlling us and I think there is one technology and one guy that and he doesn't even know this because he's like one of the most stubborn people in the world and his name is Dave Weiner and there was a format in the internet that in the 90s, called XML, which is extensible markup language, which is a way to create a flat file version of data.

And it's called X because it was a format that you would be able to conform to any kind of data.

and I don't think it's an accident that they called it XML.

Okay.

So XML, which, which they said stood for extensible markup language.

Well, Dave Weiner did something that I think blew up all of the oligarchs plans.

And that was that he, he looked at XML and he thought, what is the very simplest format of, for data that's news-based.

That's funny.

I, I, I woke up and, like, uh, my email wasn't working right and, like, things were just kinda acting weird and I r- I went to DaveNet, Dave Winer's-

[laughs]

... email list to go find out what was going on, and he's like, "We're down..." He's like, everything was just...

And so, um, you know, bu- building, you know, kind of the read-write web, everyone can be a publisher.

Uh, I worked on, you know, the, the XML, [laughs] the technical standards, RSS, uh, Dave Winer, who was, like created a lot of the blo- blogging software, Evan, who was, had created Blogger, um, and got, you know, got really involved in, in, in that and, um, and was...

Th- that to me felt like, hey, this is a way for us to k- maintain this distributed model and to e- e- empower more people to participate.

And so for me that was still remained a, a, a huge goal.