Aaron Swartz. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

[Editor's Note: Coder and activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide Jan. 11, 2013 in New York. He was 26 years old. See Wired's early coverage for details.]

When a great baseball or basketball player leaves the game they retire his or her number. That means the jersey hangs from the ceiling, or there’s a plaque at the stadium, and no player on the team ever wears that number again.

Babe Ruth’s number, 3, is retired. Michael Jordan’s too (23). Jackie Robinson’s number, 42, is retired for all baseball teams.

On the web, retiring a number would mean the website is permanently registered, and the content is preserved so it lasts as long as the web does. That means the contents of aaronsw.com will be there forever. It will never become a porn site, or a landing page, or whatever.

Right now there is no way to do this. Isn’t that strange. We could fix it if we want. The internet is just software. It would be a small but worthwhile hack and could set a precedent for future memorials.

Something to think about!

This post first appeared on Scripting News. Also see the related thread on Hacker News.

Dave Winer, a former researcher at NYU and Harvard, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software. A former contributing editor at Wired magazine, Dave won the Wired Tech Renegade award in 2001.
Follow @davewiner on Twitter.

Photo: Kevin Conboy/Flickr

A short while ago Twitter said they were going to move to JSON over XML, without much explanation other than they like JSON and not XML so much these days, etc. I’m a big believer that everyone has the right to support whatever they want when they want for whatever reason, whether they say the truth or not. Because of that belief, I take with a grain of salt every bit of support for every format and protocol. I assume that just because someone supports it today doesn’t tell you for sure that they will support it tomorrow. Though the penalty is usually pretty high for removing support for interfaces people depend on. They tend to remember it next time you ask for their trust. All that is fair game too.

So anyway, this got me thinking again about the possibility that JSON might take over from XML. What then? Should we give up all the interop we get from RSS just because it uses XML and not JSON? And it’s because of all that interop that that day will never come. A transition may happen over a long period of time, and before it’s complete there will be something after JSON. Because smart people see that, they tend to be conservative about switching just for the sake of switching. It’s why the web, which is entirely an XML application, will keep XML support everywhere for the forseeable future.

In other words, I’d bet with virtual 100 percent certainty that it’s safe to keep producing XML-based RSS feeds.

But people like JSON, there’s no denying that. And a JSONified RSS can totally co-exist with the original XML. So let’s have RSS in JSON? That’s a question that seems worth asking about, at this time.

Turns out it is a very straightforward thing to do. I of course have an RSS feed for Scripting News, the blog you’re reading right now. I wrote a script that maintains JSON and JSONP versions of the same content, automatically. When the RSS is built so are the JSON formats.

http://scripting.com/rss.json and http://scripting.com/rss.js

I learned a long time ago to embrace change. It’s why there is a RSS today that is derived from the RSS that Netscape shipped in 1999 and has features of my scriptingNews format shipped in 1997. If the world wants to go to JSON, help it get there in a way that benefits from all we learned in the evolution of RSS from 1997 through 2002. It’s stood up pretty well over the years. And there’s wide support for it, and lots of understanding of how it works. If there is to be a JSON-based syndication standard, we can cut years off the development process by simply accommodating it.

So I put together an invitation to discuss this.

http://rssjs.org/

If you find this interesting, give it some thought, and if you have something to say, write a blog post of your own, or write a comment on that page. Obviously there’s no moderation for what goes on your blog, but there will be moderation of the comments. Be aware of that. One feature of the past are personal attacks which are totally pointless and subtract from the discourse, and we should not carry that practice forward. That’s why the moderation. :-)

Otherwise, I totally look forward to hearing what people think.

Thanks…

This post first appeared on Scripting News.

Dave Winer, a former researcher at NYU and Harvard, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software. A former contributing editor at Wired magazine, Dave won the Wired Tech Renegade award in 2001.
Follow @davewiner on Twitter.

Image: Transport for London

Lowell George’s girlfriend can’t make up her mind. How he describes it is what’s so cool. “She’s got one foot on the platform, the other on the train.”

And that’s the best strategy, right now, for a reporter or blogger using Twitter.

You can’t get off the platform, that’s where everyone is. But you need a Plan B, just in case you have to get off the platform. That’s the train.

You need a tool that allows you to publish to Twitter, and at the same time publish to an open system that can be connected to other open systems. So users can create their own Twitter, the same way they use Twitter to follow many sources, without having to go through Twitter.

Twitter is the platform. The feed is the train.

It might sound complicated, but it’s not.

If Twitter were to cancel my account, I would keep posting, and people who followed me on the train (following the analogy) would continue to get my updates. The people on the platform, however — would not.

It’s how we develop strength, and the power to choose, without leaving Twitter.

If Twitter Corp plans on being nice to us, then they should not have a problem with this approach. Their API permits it. It’s consistent with Dick Costolo’s edict that we should put stuff into Twitter, but not take stuff out of it.

It’s a way to preserve journalistic integrity even if Twitter hasn’t yet figured out if it’s in the business of providing a platform for journalism.

This post first appeared on Scripting News.

Dave Winer, a former researcher at NYU and Harvard, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software. A former contributing editor at Wired magazine, Dave won the Wired Tech Renegade award in 2001.
Follow @davewiner on Twitter.

Photo by Owen W Brown/Flickr/CC

Daniel Bachhuber, a friend who works at WordPress, oohed and aahed. I asked him why he liked it so much and he said a couple of things.

The discussion was focused on this topic: How do blogs need to evolve?

I wasn’t asked to be part of the discussion, but since this is the open web, and they made their discussion public, I can say what I have to say. It’s up to them if they want to include it in their discussion.

I’ve even provided the “source code” for this post — just the text with a little bit of structure, and some attributes, with an open architecture for more attributes. So they can do more than link to it. They can “include” it.

The advantage of doing it this way is:

1. I maintain the original.
2. It can be included in as many places as it’s relevant.
3. If I want to update it, I can, and it would update in all the places it is viewable.
4. Because I can update it, that means relative writing will be kept to a minimum. People can say what they think without making an issue of who’s right and who’s wrong. Because they might not stay right or wrong for very long!

In the thread Evan Williams says that Twitter has a big advantage because it already has all the integration tools people want. It’s understandable he would think that, I suppose, having participated in creating Twitter, but I don’t agree. Here’s why.

1. When I quoted Daniel in the second paragraph, you wouldn’t believe the dance I had to do to get a link to the tweet onto the clipboard so I could link to it from my post. Even though I’ve done it dozens of times, I still made three mistakes for every action that worked.
2. Twitter has a 140-character limit, which means that for any kind of complex thought, beyond a grunt or snark (which is likely to be misunderstood because there wasn’t room to explain it) I’m going to have to include a link, which of course must be shortened.
3. As they point out in the thread, Twitter is a company town. The archive belongs to them, to do with as they please. I have no say in the future uses of my own writing.
4. Finally, the strongest point — even Twitter agrees it’s not self-contained, because they support oEmbed, which allows them to include content that’s hosted on other servers. However, they aren’t even open about being open. You can only participate if you’re a “partner.” I don’t know who pays who for this, or if anyone pays, but they admit that being open to content hosted elsewhere is necessary, but it isn’t available to the people. In other words, we’ve given up all the beauty of the internet, for what exactly? What did we get in return?

Anyway, even if I was invited to participate, all I would do is post a pointer to this blog post. Because here I own the editorial tools and can make them work any way I want to. There is no 140-character limit. There’s no problem getting a permalink. I own the archive. Sure if you want to participate it’s a bit of work, you have to set up a blog somewhere. That’s okay with me. For a little bit of work you get a whole lot of freedom. That’s a good deal.

This post first appeared on Scripting News.

Dave Winer, a former researcher at NYU and Harvard, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software. A former contributing editor at Wired magazine, Dave won the Wired Tech Renegade award in 2001.
Follow @davewiner on Twitter.

Truth is this — users are caught between tech and media. Neither of them is looking out for our interest. Each of them own politicians each owns tech. The tech industry is better at tech (no surprise) and the media industry is better at a lot of other things, including getting Congress to do their bidding.

I’ve been warning the news publishers to be careful about viewing Twitter and Facebook as if they were equivalent to the web. This would be like Kodak trusting Apple to handle its digital photography strategy. We know now how that turned out.

Twitter and Facebook are rich and getting richer. Either of them could easily buy a struggling but independent news organization. Then where would you be if you were dependent on them to distribute news? It would be like the Times depending on Murdoch to print their daily paper. Instead the Times invested in their own printing plant, presumably so they could have better control of the product, both from a creative and tactical standpoint. If Murdoch owned the presses and the trucks, who do you think would deliver the most timely news? They have to think about Twitter that way. At some point they will come to see themselves as a media company, if they don’t already.

Caught in the middle is the original idea of the Internet and the web, that people could be media instead of just consuming it. For that to continue, enough people have to see their future as publishing independently, and enough people have to read independently of corporate media, neither originating from Silicon Valley or Hollywood, to keep the flame alive.

I still hope that there’s a remnant of the idealism of tech. That there was value in the personal-ness of PCs. The net is the same way. We need to make it ever-easier for people to own and run their own infrastructure. People think it’s hard, but it doesn’t have to be! Each of us can have the equivalent of a printing plant, that’s the magic of tech. No harder to keep running than a laptop. To those people in tech who still hold to the ideal of free communication unrestricted by government or corporations, please use some of your profits to help guarantee the future of an independent Internet.

Otherwise, I think we can all see this clearly now, the net will be a single amorphous Disneyfied mess, not too far down the road.

This post first appeared on Scripting News.

Dave Winer, a former researcher at NYU and Harvard, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software. A former contributing editor at Wired magazine, Dave won the Wired Tech Renegade award in 2001.
Follow @davewiner on Twitter.

The tech world is in an infinite loop.

I’ve written about it so many times, but that’s how it goes with loops. You don’t have to write original stuff more than once. Each time around the loop, at some point, everything comes back into style.

No need to list all the loops, other than to say Here We Go Again!

At issue is this: Control.

For whatever reason, the people who run the tech companies want it. But eventually the users take it.

I wrote in 1994, my first time as a chronicler of the loops: “The users outfoxed us again. It happens every fifteen years or so in this business, We lost our grounding, the users rebelled, and a new incarnation of the software business has been created.”

In the same 1994 piece: “Once the users take control, they never give it back.”

You can see it playing out in the Twitter community, and now the Tumblr community.

It isn’t a reflection on the moral quality of the leaders of the companies, to want to control their users. But it’s a short-term proposition at best. Either the companies learn how to take the lead from their users, or they will be sidelined. Unless the laws of technology are repealed, and I don’t think laws like that can be repealed.

Lest you think I was smart enough to see this coming in my own early experience as a tech entrepreneur, I wasn’t. We were scared of software piracy, didn’t understand how we could continue to be in business with software that could be easily copied. So we established controls that made it difficult for non-technical users to copy the software. That created a market of other software that would copy our software. So it was reduced down to whether or not the users would knowingly do something we disapproved of. Many of our users were honorable, they did what I would have done in their place. They stopped using our products. I would regularly receive letters from customers, people who had paid over $200 for the disks our software came on, with the disks cut in half with a scissor. These letters made their point loud and clear. One day everyone took off their copy protection, and the users got what they wanted. I came to believe then that this is always so.

This time around, Apple has been the leader in the push to control users. They say they’re protecting users, and to some extent that is true. I can download software onto my iPad feeling fairly sure that it’s not going to harm the computer. I wouldn’t mind what Apple was doing if that’s all they did, keep the nasty bits off my computer. But of course, that’s not all they do. Nor could it be all they do. Once they took the power to decide what software could be distributed on their platform, it was inevitable that speech would be restricted too. I think of the iPad platform as Disneyfied. You wouldn’t see anything there that you wouldn’t see in a Disney theme park or in a Pixar movie.

The sad thing is that Apple is providing a bad example for younger, smaller companies like Twitter and Tumblr, who apparently want to control the “user experience” of their platforms in much the same way as Apple does. They feel they have a better sense of quality than the randomness of a free market. So they’ve installed similar controls. Your content cannot be displayed by Twitter unless you’re one of their partners. How you get to be a partner is left to your imagination. We have no visibility into it.

Tumblr has decided that a browser add-on is unwelcome. Presumably it’s only an issue because a fair number of their users want to use it. So they are taking issue not only with the developer, but with the users. They have admitted that the problem is that they must “educate” their users better. Oy! Does this sound familiar. In the end, it will be the other way around. It has to be. It’s the lesson of the Internet.

My first experience with the Internet came as a grad student in the late 70s, but it wasn’t called the Internet then. I loved it because of its simplicity and the lack of controls. There was no one to say you could or couldn’t ship something. No gatekeeper. In the world it was growing up alongside, the mainframe world, the barriers were huge. An individual person couldn’t own a computer. To get access you had to go to work for a corporation, or study at a university.

Every time around the loop, since then, the Internet has served as the antidote to the controls that the tech industry would place on users. Every time, the tech industry has a rationale, with some validity, that wide-open access would be a nightmare. But eventually we overcome their barriers, and another layer comes on. And the upstarts become the installed-base, and they make the same mistakes all over again.

It’s the Internet vs the Un-Internet. And the Internet, it seems, always prevails.

Photo: Benoit/Flickr

This post first appeared on Scripting News.

Dave Winer, a visiting scholar at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software. A former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, Dave won the Wired Tech Renegade award in 2001.
Follow @davewiner on Twitter.

Had I known it was going to get so much attention I would have spelled out exactly what I meant by app. The question came up e-mailing with Brent Simmons who wrote a post about my post yesterday. I didn’t understand the confusion until I did a little back and forth with him.

I said this: “I mean app as in ‘there’s an app for that.’”

I’m talking about the newspaper or magazine that, when you click on a link to go to one of their articles, puts up an interstitial telling you that you could read the article in their app instead. Initially, I installed one or two of these. The other day I installed a big comprehensive one from Google. Flipboard is the original one of these reading environments that is not the web. The New York Times has a slow, buggy, huge app for reading their news.

Now don’t get me wrong; there’s no reason they shouldn’t produce these apps. Go ahead. They have every right. But I also have every right not to use them. And if they insist, as the New York Post does (its content isn’t available for iPad users on any other terms) I can just skip their content altogether (which in the case of the Post, who gives away their paper at subway entrances in NYC and is an awful Murdoch trash rag that would be an insult to dead fish to be wrapped in it, feels just right).

If that’s all there was to it, I probably never would have written this piece. But last week I read about a speech given at LeWeb in Paris by George Colony of Forrester Research, that got a lot of coverage. He said the web is over, and apps are the future. (BTW, when you search for George Colony on Google they’re so sure you meant George Clooney they don’t even offer the choice of George Colony.)

It was that speech, plus Google’s app, plus a well-timed interstitial that got me thinking: Why is it that I find this concept of the future so repulsive?

I wrote five pieces yesterday. I guess that was the best one. Sure hit a nerve. A lot of people agree. Enough with the apps already.

I think the publishers like the idea because it offers hope of a new paywall, an electronic one. My guess is that it’s a hope in vain.

Tablets are almost ideal reading environments. I don’t think, as some developers do, that the iPad is the ultimate. I think it’s heavy and cold, and makes my arm fall asleep when I read lying down. I think the software is a glitchy. Like great movies, great computer experiences are all about suspension of disbelief. If I forget I’m reading on an iPad and get consumed by the story, then the technology is working perfectly. The iPad experience is good, but there’s still a way to go. And all this business about apps is a real spoiler for suspension of disbelief. I’m clicking a link, expecting to learn more about what I was reading (that was certainly the author’s intent) but instead I get an ad for an app. If I seriously consider it, I’ve lost my train of thought. If I actually take the detour and install it, I’ve lost big time. The best way to minimize the loss is hit the Back button and skip it. But that’s a loss too. I clicked the link for a reason. And that was thwarted.

I’d be happy with a pref that says to all websites “I’m never going to install your app, so please don’t bother with the pitch.” Sort of like a No Solicitors sign on the front door of my house (which I don’t have; it’s too rude to people who are not solicitors).

BTW, I wrote a piece a month ago about Google’s search website on the iPad and how awful it is. They made it even worse. Now if you click on the Classic link at the bottom of the page you lose your search string and have to enter it again. At least in the past when you clicked Classic, after scrolling to the bottom of the page, you got the search results you were looking at in a more compact form.

To anyone from Microsoft who may be reading this far, here’s a chance to get a bunch of iPad users. Make Bing work exactly like Google on the desktop, on the iPad. Or offer it as an option. I will use your search engine from now on on the iPad if you do that. Google is deliberately screwing their iPad users. Now you guys can be the heroes.

All of this is of course IMHO, as if that needs to be said. But when there are a bunch of new Apple zealots reading stuff here calling me “some people” or “this guy” in my own blog, well it needs to be said.

Also, I let comments run more or less rampant in the last post. It got to be too much to moderate them all. Even so, if a comment required my approval and it was idiotic or unnecessary (How many times do we need to hear that there are things called intents?) I just let it sit there unapproved. You don’t have a right to place your ideas here. If I’m not reading your book-length comment, why should I impose it on my readers?

This post first appeared on Scripting News.

Dave Winer, a visiting scholar at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software. A former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, Dave won the Wired Tech Renegade award in 2001.
Follow @davewiner on Twitter.