Those who don’t like soap operas move along, you’ll be disappointed in what follows for certain.

Earlier today I tried to wrap my mind around what Dave Winer’s beef is with the RSS Advisory board headed by (former?) friend and contract worker Rogers Cadenhead. Here’s the cast of RSS characters and these are the days of RSS lives (and for those I don’t link up, it’s not intentional or personal, it’s laziness on my part of not wanting to track down every single person’s blog or link in this post):

Meg Hourihan claim to fame was being one of the co-founders of Pyra Labs (blogger.com) which ultimately sold to Google. The last I heard from her was she was going to pursue her dream as a chef, but has returned now? According to her blog about page she is neither Chef nor Internet Entrepreneur but something “in between.” I think Paul Bautsch who was also part of the early Pyra Labs, and was responsible for more of the technical backend might be a wiser choice to be on this panel if technical expertise is desired, but maybe Meg’s inclusion is for some other business-related side of RSS?

Six Apart, makers of Movable Type and TypePad (and owners of Live Journal) have Loïc Le Meur, the executive vice president of Europe, Middle East and Africa for Six Apart and developer for all three the aforementioned products as well as Ublog, which is popular in Europe. Never heard of Mr. Le Meur, but he seems like a wise and useful addition to the panel.

Jenny Levine nails down the librarian side of RSS and publishes The Shifted Librarian. No panel without complete without a Colonel Mustard in the study and Ms. Levine seems to fit this role rather studiously.

Feedburner has their chief technology officer, Eric Lunt representing. Another wise choice for the panel as Feedburner has done some exciting things with their RSS Feed hosting and stats for bloggers. If somebody from their organization wasn’t on this board there would be a hole.

Of course Dave Sifry from Technorati is on this board. This guy is the fly on the wall of every RSS/blog-related event. I wonder if there are like three of him. Glad to see him there.

Newsgator representation a la Greg Reinacker, founder and chief technology officer. Another wise choice for the panel.

Randy Charles Morin is said to have the largest RSS blog audience (1,000 subscribers?), is that right? He’s written some books and been a busy blogger. He’s shown up here a few times in the comments area more over spam-related posts than RSS, but he seems like a personable chap and I could see his perspective being helpful to this group.

Ross Mayfield is the “…founder of Socialtext, an enterprise social software company that fosters collaboration through weblogging and wiki tools.” What a mouthful just saying that description out loud. Is this guy filling the buzzword bingo spot on the panel? I’m not sure how useful a guy with wiki and social software is to an RSS advisory panel, so maybe those in the know can fill me into where this guy brings something significant to the table. None of this is a knock on Mayfield as a person, blogger, businessperson, etc, I’m just confused where he fits into the puzzle.

So of the group of eight, I only see two potential weak spots for furthering the goals of RSS, and it is possible that both Hourihan and Mayfield both are quite deserving and it is this writer’s ignorance (moi) that isn’t paying them necessary respect. Forgive me in advance if that’s the case.

And then we get to the former RSS Advisory panel list. Those no longer in the group which include: Adam Curry, Andrew Grumet, Brent Simmons, Jon Udell, Dave Winer and Steve Zellers.

Adam Curry was on the original RSS Advisory board? In addition to MTV and podcasting he gets around. The name Andrew Grumet is familiar (MIT grad), but don’t know Steve Zellers. Brent Simmons is the wizard behind the popular Mac RSS Aggregator NetNewsWire that was acquired by Newsgator (so the panel already has coverage there). That leaves Jon Udell, well known author and writer for Infoworld among others. Too bad he’s not still on the panel. Maybe he can be brought back.

Now back to Winer’s sour grapes. Mathew Ingram does a good job of laying down the background for where the RSS soap opera begins to unfold, quoting some choice Winer comments which suggest he is less than happy with the direction of this group. Ingram writes:

The sad thing is that Dave’s efforts will probably do a fair amount of damage to the advisory board, and his talking to various corporate backers of the idea might just sabotage a lot of what the group is attempting to do - which, let’s remember, is to improve the spec. Dave would rather have it frozen in amber for eternity, which is why Atom was developed - as a way of routing around Dave (as James Robertson puts it, the reason why Atom exists is demonstrated “every single time Dave speaks on the subject”).

Why Dave would want the spec frozen is a mystery to me and frankly, I’m not buying that’s his goal. Visionaries like Winer don’t want to freeze time, they want to look at what and where the future will bring us. This perhaps is the real story here. Is it because he doesn’t get to control it? A power struggle? Is it because he has good reason to believe the spec will be subverted or made unnecesarily complicated? Good concerns for somebody to voice on that panel. A panel needs to have voices which disagree and debate. The fact that they unanimously voted in the RSS Validator (8-0) as one of their first acts (?) doesn’t indicate any opposing forces among the group yet. This is a bad example though because there isn’t much to disagree on as the RSS Validator being an official source to follow. Will be interesting to see as more issues come up with RSS what sort of voting takes place and where the dissidents emerge. If all votes are always unanimous it’s time to examine the odor.

[BTW, notice how Scoble goes completely quiet on this stuff whenever Winer goes off on tangents like these (and no, Scoble, I’m not linkbaiting you on this, I’m genuinely curious if you know what the deal is with your friend, Winer? You can answer in the comments, send it to me via email, send a smokescreen down south, whatever, I’m not trying to get a link out of you to get the answer to what seems like a fair question.)]

This RSS Advisory board sounds like a good idea to move the RSS spec forward and as somebody who sits from afar and is merely peripherally involved (as an RSS user and blogger and developer of a few RSS-related tools that we use mostly ourselves) I would like to know the spec isn’t dead as far as further development. I wish Dave Winer would get involved instead of feeling (?) and acting like he’s on the outside of this process. His past work aside which is legendary and cannot be taken away plus the current work he’s been doing with his OPML Editor makes his efforts quite relevant for this panel. Will none of the rest of these people on the panel work with him? What’s the breakdown here?

If it’s Dave’s confrontational and combative style, that’s clearly Dave’s personality and somebody on that panel should have the balls to call him up and say: “Dave, we want you on this panel — we really would like your input — but, please you need to work with us as a group and not fight with us.” If nobody has had that conversation, then the entire panel should be disbanded and replaced by people who are willing to look beyond Dave’s personality and try and make the thing come together. The panel just isn’t valid with Dave Winer on the sidelines even if he’s a huge pain in the ass in a group setting, sorry.

Others I’d like to see on the RSS Advisory panel — just my own personal opinion about people who I think would do good for the RSS spec as a whole — are representatives from MSN Spaces, perhaps Mike Torres, Dare Obasanjo or both. Mark Pilgrim, where is he? I’m sure his inclusion because he was instrumental in the Atom fork (I’m sure this wouldn’t make Dave happy, but he has something to contribute).

Now what about the podcasting side of things? If Curry can’t be lured back, who else would/could represent this side of things? Let me put Doug Kayes from IT Conversatiosn or my friend Rob Greenlee from Webtalk Radio or Eric Rice names in the hat as I think all of them would be useful. Videoblogging? The people behind Rocketboom sure make sense. And while we are talking about good RSS custodians, let’s get somebody in there that’s actually making money from RSS and blogging, somebody commercial like Chris Pirillo. He’s even more omnipresent than Dave Sifry . Lastly, is anybody from Google involved? If not, I could see somebody like Matt Cutts or perhaps more aptly Biz Stone (does Biz still work in the blogger division?).

I’m sure readers can add other people that would be good for the RSS Panel Advisory list, so go ahead and name them in the comments and keep this rolling.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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