I had a post ready to go yesterday called “The Fuss Over RSS”.

I deleted it without publishing, because I just couldn’t imagine it going any further than a couple of days.

Boy, was I wrong there.

Scoble’s still tracking fallout.
Gillmor’s smoked some of Winer’s weed, thinking like a sneaky businessperson. Been reading Andy Grove lately?
Winer’s just, well, gone berko.
Mike is trying to be the voice of sanity here, but is getting misquoted and mischaraterized by poorly-researched point-missing pieces.

What the hell is wrong with you people? You’re carrying on like children.

Winer: An RSS Feed is called an RSS Feed, sure. There are other formats, which are also called “feeds”, like NNTP and Atom. Please, deal with it.

Aggregators will aggregate feeds of many different formats, not just RSS. Would you rather all feeds were referred to specifically? What would you call the top-level folder? Are you trying to say that IE should have Web Feeds/RSS Feeds, Web Feeds/Atom Feeds, Web Feeds/CDF, Web Feeds/Klip, or do you think lumping them all together as Feeds actually makes sense?

Would you rather call Atom and NNTP feeds RSS Feeds, or would you rather the format was used as a stepping stone to something larger and more useful?

I’m a Human. Adolf Hitler was also Human. Distasteful as it may be, you could – and probably would – group us together and call us Humans.

If that example is too abstract, how’s this? Marvel created some characters in comics. So did DC comics. Question: Would you group them together? Sure, I would. I’d have a Comics folder, and shove the lot into them, and worry about implementation specifics later.

It’s called grouping. It helps people understand and get over the fact that sixteen different formats can accomplish the same bloody thing.

Now please, everyone, get back to the business of inventing cool new stuff.