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I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet

getpolarized.io

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Re: I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet

#33

I’m not terribly familiar with the history of RSS. In what way were you involved with its invention?

https://twobithistory.org/2018/12/18/rss.html grep'd for Dave Winer, check. Grep'd for OP - not found.

Look under RSS 1.0. It’s not the same as RSS .91 or 2.0 userland/Dave Winer branches. To call it simply as “RSS”? I dunno

Re: I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet

#36

From a marketing perspective, it’s really advisable to tell people what your thing is before asking for money. Not being snarky - from taking a quick glance I genuinely couldn’t tell what the thing is and I’m unlikely to sit through a video without at least some high level intro of what I’m going to get.

And even if I knew what I was supporting...I guess the plan is to raise $27/current user (which seems completely unrealistic) which will allow them to limp along until they definitely raise $150,000 from the "Internet as a whole", which will allow them to limp along until they definitely get approved for a whole bunch of grants? Nothing about that inspires any confidence and left me pretty convinced that I would be f…

To quote from the article,

> We polled our users and asked them what they would be willing do donate and the average was twenty seven dollars, and of course we have thousands of users

Which is based on the illusion that you get an unbiased sample when you ask users to respond to a poll. You don't - the people most likely to sacrifice a moment of their time are also those more likely to come forward with money, conversely those who didn't fill out the questionnaire probably have a majority of people who won't give any money.

Re: I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet

#37
post #29

You are not Dan Libby, Ramanathan Guha, Dave Winer, or one of the members of the RSS-DEV Working Group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS#History So why are you claiming to be one of the inventors of RSS?

Yes.. I was. the initial documents were never amended as RSS evolved.

Here's one of the modules I created:

http://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/link/

I think the archive is down but the rss-dev group has thousands of posts of me responding and supporting the dev or RSS.

https://www.egroups.com/group/rss-dev

Additionally, I don't really care about being famous for creating something and it's always seemed obnoxious to constantly insist that you were the creator of something.

I was involved in a massive public dispute where Dave Winer had a freakout when I tried to collaborate with him on RSS (he attacked the whole RSS 1.0 movement) and I got sick of constantly getting in flame wars when I'm just trying to improve the Internet.

I also created Apache Feedparser.

Re: I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet

#38

From a marketing perspective, it’s really advisable to tell people what your thing is before asking for money. Not being snarky - from taking a quick glance I genuinely couldn’t tell what the thing is and I’m unlikely to sit through a video without at least some high level intro of what I’m going to get.

Agreed! This is exactly what I thought when watching it. He mentions "changing the internet" and that was it. Then started asking for money and outlining his plans to launch and indiegogo and I still had no clue what Polar even was.

Re: I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet

#39
I'm not sure I understand how what looks like a poor Evernote clone is supposed to "reboot the Internet". We're far from Xanadu.

I'm all for open source, collaboration, personal knowledge management, spaced repetition learning, etc. but this document centric approach seems outdated to me. I thought we were supposed to move toward a more semantic web, something closer to a database than to a bunch of human-written documents. How does the rest of my data, such as quantified self style measurements, fit in this model?

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