Giving Dave Winer the /usr/bin/finger

$ finger dave@scripting.com

On the way home from work tonight I was listening to the Adam Curry's latest Daily Sourcecode podcast in which Xeni Jardin's Wired interview, and subsequent controversy from Dave Winer was the hot topic...

For the past few months there's been something nagging at the back of my mind around the whole topic of who created podcasts, blogs, rss, and pretty much anything else in the public eye...

First up, we'll agree that Dave co-created RSS 0.91, theres no point denying that, not even the published/edited Wired article denys that:

I'm one of the people who created it, although I didn't create the name. It was back in July 2004. I just took bits and pieces of technology that already existed -- RSS, MP3s, iPods and other portable players -- and tried to bring them together to accomplish a simple task.

"technology that already existed" - ok, so credit to the creators of those technologies is only implied, but it doesn't sound like Adam's taking total glory here. In Dave's post he mentions his first "iPodder", looking at the screenshot I see that yes; it schedules and downloads enclosures, but from looking at it - theres no mention of the automated synchronisation into iTunes which Adam's original script aimed to provide; so by my definition - it's not an iPodder/podcatcher.

But I'm getting off the topic of this mini-rant, the nagging thought at the back of my mind has nothing to do with podcasting, blogging, or even RSS, but more - at the underlying concept of syndication itself. The heart, and core of everything bloglike. The earliest record of my blogging I can find is the 1997 version of Dinky Dark World, I'd never heard of Dave Winer, blogging wasn't a word ( although journals, and journalers were... ), back then; syndication wasn't the unbiquitous thing it is today. Forget about aggregators, XML itself was a new world explore, and pioneers - like Dave, were among the first to weild the new beast to solve problems with the emerging desire for easy syndication...

The earliest form of mass-adopted website syndication that I remember, was headlines.txt, a simple ASCII textfile, listing a headline, a date, and a URL on consecutive lines, some content management systems out there still generate these files, or variations like recentnews.txt.

Visual Paradigm for UML (Community Edition) 4.1 20050517a (Linux)
Tue, May 17th 2005 02:46
http://freshmeat.net/releases/196413/
GNU TeXmacs 1.0.5.1 (Default)
Tue, May 17th 2005 02:43
http://freshmeat.net/releases/196412/

It was only once XML became widely popular, and easier to use in scripting languages, that formats "standardized", with the hope of having something consistent, something that could be validated, and guaranteed to work; and I'm sure James has some comments to say about that :)

But going back even further, the earlist incarnation of information syndication takes me back to /usr/bin/finger and a users ~/.plan file. Where a user of a UNIX system could easily "finger dawn@dawnanddrew.com" and here the latest moans and groans^H^H^H^H^H^HH^H^H^H information about from their ~/.plan file.

Just think - .plan+finger was technically one of the earliest bloglike publication/syndication services on the internet.

NAME
     finger - user information lookup program

SYNOPSIS
     finger [-lmsp] [user ...] [user@host ...]

DESCRIPTION
     The finger displays information about the system users.

     Options are:

     -s    Finger displays the user’s login name, real name, terminal name and write
           status (as a ‘‘*’’ after the terminal name if write permission is denied),
           idle time, login time, office location and office phone number.

           Login time is displayed as month, day, hours and minutes, unless more than
           six months ago, in which case the year is displayed rather than the hours
           and minutes.

           Unknown devices as well as nonexistent idle and login times are displayed
           as single asterisks.

     -l    Produces a multi-line format displaying all of the information described
           for the -s option as well as the user’s home directory, home phone number,
           login shell, mail status, and the contents of the files “.plan”,
           “.project”, “.pgpkey” and “.forward” from the user’s home directory.

I even remember religously fingering John Carmack (blog format, ironically, now with rss) in the good ol days for news and updates on DOOM, and the subsequent reading in magazines as a journalist comments "recently mentioned in his .plan file, Carmack...." - it would seem the circle is once again complete.

Here's a question: is there anyone out there publishing their RSS feed -as- their ~/.plan file? Hell, post your podcast as a base64 mime encoded attachment to your ~/.plan - screw RSS, screw Dave Winer, lets start PLANcasting!

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