A message to the lurkers on the list

["Tristan Louis" <tristan@dorsai.org>]

A message to the lurkers on the list:

There are only a few people talking in this thread yet egroups shows 
that there are 239 members on the list. Folks, it's time to delurk. 
We have a lot of work to do here.

First, we need to come to term as to whether we want to move on to a 
spec that would be different from the RSS 1.0 one. There still seems 
to be some issues around that. According to the poll on that matter 
(http://www.egroups.com/surveys/syndication?id=320021) a vast 
majority want to move on to 1.0. However, that vast majority is 12 
people out of 16 votes. On 239 members, there wasn't even a tenth to 
make that decision!

Second, if we do so, we then need to figure out whether we want to 
still call it RSS (which could create some confusion in the 
marketplace) or something else. The main reason behind this is to 
clear up the air so that if that spec were to evolve, we can all 
agree on it. 

Third, we would need to define what goes in and what does not. That's 
a major piece of work. As part of this, we need to assess the 
membership's view on complexity. Where do we draw the line. Some of 
us are better versed at software development than others so the line 
has to be drawn somewhere but without your consideration

Fourth, we might want to create an evangelism sub-group to convince 
the big players in software (the usual suspects: Microsoft, Netscape, 
Oracle, IBM, Sun, etc...) to integrate this in their software 
offering. That group should also be involved in evangelizing to the 
big boys of content (traditional media and large online content 
players) about the benefits of RSS (or whatever we call the new spec) 
and why they should support it.

Last but not least here: this is an open forum and we are trying to 
define a standard. There are a few times in your internet career 
where you get a chance to do so. Much like an election, some people 
will gripe after a standard has been defined. However, it is my view 
that your right to gripe is annuled if you do not get involved. In 
other words, it's easy for people to stand aside, not make any 
decision either way, and then complain about the results. While there 
are some disagreements between the people who are exchanging emails 
on this list and others (see the whole battle between the pro-RDF and 
anti-RDF groups as a prime example), those people are trying to push 
the standard in one way or another. If you don't get involved, then 
you might end up with something you really don't like. 

As you can see, there is a lot of work here and it will affect you 
one way or another. Please get involved! I've created a few polls on 
the egroups site (http://www.egroups.com/polls/syndication) to cover 
some of what I talked about here. All the polls are anonymous so no 
one will know what you voted for but it will make it easier for us to 
assess in which direction to go. Please vote, it will only take you 
less than 5 minutes and could make a lot of difference.

Allright, end of public service message and general bitching. Let's 
get going!