Echo Is Not /R(SS|DF) [0-2]\.[0-9]{1,2}/

It all starts here -- Scripting News. Actually, no, it all starts here (Netscape), and where I first ran into it -- the little configurable slashboxes on /. And, if you have paid no attention to all of this "content syndication" brouhaha and you cannot decipher the "line noise" at the title of this entry and you have not noticed that I have made several other posts referencing this agglomeration of "design by blogging" a.k.a. "engineering principles applied via yelling the loudest (even though everyone is still just using a keyboard no matter what your BlogShares worth is)", you have no idea what I am talking about. Consider yourself better off. What I am talking about is RDF which begat RSS 0.9x which begat RSS version... version... uhh... well... it would take a numerological researcher to figure out the family tree from there.

Originally, RDF and RSS were ways to notify other places of content. Just look at the slashboxes. They are simple. You use a structured file format in a publicized location that contained a couple of key items -- the title of an article and a URL to access the article. After that, throw in some more simple items like maybe an author and/or a brief description; then, wrap the whole thing up in some meta-data that refers to the original site. Voila! Any barnyard animal with an install of Perl and LWP can "syndicate" any other sites content.

But, there's a difference between barnyard animals and the Internet horde. Cows and pigs and sheep are content with the grain they receive. The denizens of the "blogosphere" want meta-data with their breakfast. Enter in a new conceptual model of a (for lack of a better generalization) standard, self-contained, published Internet object (be that what it may). Let's call that Echo (or Pie or whatever... anything but R[A-Z]{2}), and let's have someone explain why we need it for content syndication What is Echo?. Take that, grab a pair of scissors, and run with it; and what do you get -- a set of uniform "services"; the mother of all API's that will define how to interact with blogging; an effort to not only deprecate the common methods of syndication, but to also replace any common methods of interacting with blogging and blog-like software (and an obligatory link to a kuro5hin entry describing how and why that is going in What's Wrong with the MetaWeblog API?).

So, now what has happened? We have lost the Unix philosophy. The underpinning principle or set of principle(s) that govern the Internet.

Do one thing and do it well.

Why would I use Echo for syndication?

I wouldn't. I would use RSS for syndication. Echo is too complex and does too much. Sure, Echo in its final form could be used for syndication, but I don't use Perl when all I want to do is print the output of a text file to the screen; rather, I use cat.

Echo is not RSS. RSS will be used for syndication and will continue to be used for syndication no matter the form of Echo. Echo is something else and trying to do something else. I will bet that most of the main blogging tools will support RSS for syndication, Echo for interoperability, and something else for interaction within their own software.

I don't foresee anyone forgoing using RSS for syndication in favor of Echo no matter the clamoring of the barnyard to design a wheel so round it rolls uphill.