I haven't been a frequentor of Adam Curry's weblog for a very long time, but from my rather brief experience he's not exactly making a lot of sense a lot of the time.

A little over a week ago, the 29:th of June, he made the following assessments:

It wasn't until I read Sjoerd's expanaition of the differences between RSS and Echo that I remember what I think was Dave's original name that begat the acronym: Rich Site Summary. That describes something entirely different to a syndication format. Ofcourse it's an excellent syndication format at the same tuime, because it's really a bare-bones view of what is actually displayed on your weblog's homepage. I wonder if netscape came up with the Really Simple Syndication when they hijacked the name for what they called rss1.0. Adam Curry

I made the following comment on that post:

Hold your horses, cowboy!

1. Netscape created RSS.
2. Netscape, afaik, named it "Rich Site Summary" (because it used to only contain a *summary* of a post)
3. Netscape had absolutely nothing to do with RSS 1.0, Netscape's involvement stopped when they defined RSS 0.91.
4. Dave Winer renamed RSS to "Really Simple Syndication".

You assume too much. Tomas Jogin

Dave Winer confirmed my comments, although he claimed "co-creation" credits for RSS along with Netscape, too. Let's, for now, ignore the fact that Dave has no such attribution or credit from Netscape (other than being a "vocal person in the community").

This time, Adam Curry's taking a stand on RSS:

I asked Userland [one and a half years ago] if I could purchase a pre-installed feed on their aggregator, which supports RSS xml feeds. I paid $10,000 for a one year license. Adam Curry

For anyone who is slightly confused about what he means by that, let me clarify: Adam Curry paid UserLand $10,000 for his weblog to be included as one of the default -- "pre-installed" -- feeds in Radio's RSS aggregator.

While I personally wouldn't make that kind of investment even if I had a sizeable heap of money just lying around, Adam's entitled to buy whatever he likes with his own money. I'd expect a little bit of integrity on UserLand's part though; that's a paid placement or a sponsored feed and should be listed as such.

He continues:

Besides investing in the technology with user licenses for Frontier and Radio UserLand, I ponied up to the bar and made a commitment to a format. And now I feel fucked.

The $10k didn't 'just' give me an automatic base within the userland community, it got pasted on web pages all over the world and I've built up an audience that consists of 50% aggergator users.

But this investment is clearly being halted short by the (N)echo project. Adam Curry

Adam feels fucked; he thinks that support for Necho is mutually exclusive with support for RSS 2.0, which is bad for his investment. I have no idea why or how he reached that conclusion, but my theory is that heavy medication was involved. Seriously though, that conclusion makes no sense at all.

Keeping in mind that RSS 1.0 isn't backwards or forwards compatible with other versions of RSS and that doesn't stop it, or any other version of RSS, from being widely supported, his assessments seem pretty far from substantial.

Necho's opponents seems to think that the introduction of Necho 1.0 will completely wipe out support for RSS. That is not the case. As long as users want RSS feeds, they will be available by content providers and supported by aggregators.

So I'm invoking an age olde american tradition of letting my wallet do the talking. I will again invest $10k in aggregator default placements this year, but I will spread it around, to all developers who adhere to RSS2.0. Include (N)echo and you're out of luck. Adam Curry

This is, of course, backwards logic. The creator of the popular RSS aggregator SharpReader has this to say:

Which aggregators should you invest in? Well the ones that will give you the most new subscribers of course, but herein lies the problem: if necho becomes a success, any aggregator that does not support it will surely lose market-share, thus diminishing your investment. Luke Hutteman

Adam Curry obviously has no clue about what RSS or Necho is about, he's slinging FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) around with no overhead view of what's going on, what has been going on or what will be going on. His supposed reasons for doing so are dubious, illogical and confusing.

I wonder if he's getting paid...

PS. Anyone who can point out the Star Wars reference, is a geek.

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