The Blog of Harald

I was reading discussions of news aggregators and RSS and lack of presentation in aggregators and webpage scrapers and trackbacks come-tos and on and on and it suddenly occured to me:

We’ve managed to re-invent UseNet, only instead of topic-oriented newsgroups, we have a system where each newsgroup is an individual’s (or a small group’s) personal playground. Only it’s been done poorly.

That’s a whole lot of effort to get to the same place :-)

This seems to happen all the time. We’ve spent the last 20 years re-inventing the OS security models that used to exist in mainframes. Web-forums are a poor replacement for e-mail lists with searchable archives. As has already been discussed elsewhere, the result of Trackback and friends is a bunch of people talking at each other instead of having a conversation, a poor replacement for both e-mail and usenet. XML? I could go on and on, I’m sure.

Which finally leads to the meta-issue: Once again we’ve reached the point where if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In this case, the hammer is HTTP, and the nail includes e-mail, usenet news, FTP, WAIS/archie, RPC, and yes, even IP (see http-tunnel).

If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning…

Update: In an amusing twist, I discovered today that DJ is Tinkering with RSS and NNTP, thus proving that we really have come full circle. (Thanks to 0xDECAFBAD for the link.)