Disqus - Latest Comments for Ben Houston

Re: Hey Dave — you have to let go of RSS

Ben Houston — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 15:49:39 -0000

If you look into RSS history you'll see that it is filled with political machinations with Dave Winer at the center. The political nature of RSS motivated the creation of Atom, which addresses most issues with RSS via the Internet Engineering Task Force, an effor that was lead by Canadian Tim Bray (who back in the 1990s led the development of XML.) Dave Winer though has fought a battle against Atom for reasons similar to why he is now fighting the RSS Advisory Board. The need to keep himself central has also motivated Dave to attack those that try to spread the use of the format-neutral "web feed" terminology for RSS and Atom feeds. Dave's attacks on Google started when Google adopted Atom [1] and his attacks on Microsoft were motivated in part by that companies use of the term web feed [2].

Re: There’s good Dave, and there’s bad Dave…

Ben Houston — Sun, 26 Feb 2006 11:49:25 -0000

Dave, from my experience reading his blog, can be very vindictive when companies behave in ways that he does not like.

One example would be Dave's brush up with Tim O'Reilly back in 2000. You'll notice even now that Dave tends to bash anything that has to do with O'Reilly such as the foo camp, or Tim's conference speakers.

link

A more recent incident is when Google adopted Atom feeds. Since then Dave has taken to bashing most things that Google introduces. Before then Dave would say good things and mention that he had a conflict of interest (i.e. stock holdings.)

link

Another recent example, and this time it was just a threat to start bashing a company, was Dave's response to Microsoft adopting the term "web feed" instead of RSS.. After the post below, Microsoft did back down and now Dave is back to talking about Microsoft in a relatively positive light.

link

Re: Digg Going Nuts over HD DVD Hack

Ben Houston — Tue, 01 May 2007 21:52:42 -0000

What is interesting is that it seems that Digg has a business relationship with HD-DVD in that HD-DVD has been sponsoring some Revision3 podcasts.

Re: The new A list

Ben Houston — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:34:37 -0000

It is my opinion that you Robert Scoble are relatively corrupt with regards to Dave Winer. You basically owe him a lot for where you are today. I think that you are willing to bow down and pay him respects when he needs it even if he doesn't deserve it. The Web 2.0 buzz machine is corrupt in this respect. Your attacks on the new A-list are nothing real, just spin and bs. I think that your blog clique is trying its best to stick together (whether you have to lie about others to do it or not) because that is where the power comes from -- the synergy. Anyways, I'm done following your blog.