[eduction]

This seems a little unfair, maybe unintentionally on your part. If you’ve been reading his blog long enough (and I don’t know the value of “long enough” since I’ve been reading so long) it becomes clear he situates new proposals and tools in into a ton of context - how he came to think this new thing would be useful. This involves discussing history. By necessity this disproportionately is his own professional / independent developer history. I find this approach generally refreshing and honest - most software emerges from a path dependent individual context but people tend to suggest they just developed the objectively best solution to a widespread problem. Dave tends to be more honest about scratching his own itch and the influence of his own history on how he approaches problems.

This approach can read as ego / bragging maybe, if you’re not familiar with it. “Why is he talking about his past projects so much,” etc. Well because it led into why he thinks the new project is a good idea.

Not to say he doesn’t have some ego like all people. He does want people to know for example that podcasts were a natural outgrowth of RSS, so natural he hand a hand in adding it himself despite not having an audio background. But his point is almost always that podcasting should stay open, not that he is some genius. If anythint he tends to encourage non developers (eg journalists) to be more involved in developing new standards.

(Also the “fixation” on blogs without titles is about the fact that RSS the standard is perfectly capable of carrying Twitter type items without titles, since it only specifies either a title or description as required - but feed readers mostly assume titles which has encouraged a heavyweight high effort concept of what a post is, to the advantage of closed platforms like Twitter and to the disadvantage of the RSS ecosystem. I think he has a very good point on this. These details matters. That they are “background noise” to many users - well so are most important technical details. Try getting most users to understand the difference between transport and end to end encryption for example. )

[ttepasse]

> He does want people to know for example that podcasts were a natural outgrowth of RSS, so natural he hand a hand in adding it himself despite not having an audio background.

In that he is right by the way: He had a back and forth with Adam Curry, I believe, about audio attachments, and as a result Winer added the enclosure element. Everything else about podcasts, the name, the MediaRSS extensions, the coopting by Apple, the iTunes directory and extensions, the professionalization, came later. Funnily enough Winer tends to think about his own podcasts more as a stream of consciousness voice memo than an edited product.

(Yes, I'm reading him that long. Like pretty much everyone, who reads him that long, I have mixed and complicated about him.)