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Adam Curry Caught in Sticky Wiki

When I developed Ed Radio a couple of years ago, I was pretty pleased with it. What it did was to use Edu_RSS to scrape RSS feeds for MP3 audio links, then combine them into a single feed, so that when you clicked on the link the audio would start playing in your player. It was an obvious and important step in the development of podcasting, and that's why there is a reference to it in the Wikipedia entry about podcasting. I don't know whether it directly influenced Dave Winer and Adam Curry (I've long suspected Winer of reading this website, but he never cites my work in his blog), but it makes it clear that what became podcasting in the fall of 2004 was the result of many voices. Anyhow, it has come to light that Adam Curry has been revising the Wikipedia entry to, as this article says, "remove credit from other people and inflate his role in its creation." I am one of the people he removed. And so I find myself part of a minor web controversy. But look: people always believe they deserve credit, and sometimes they (and I include myself in this) believe they deserve more credit than is due. It is a tricky balance between establishing genuine credit and going overboard. Today, for example, I am asking what the role of mIDm is in the history of distributed authentication. It would be pretty easy to edit the wiki and write myself in; after all, mIDm pre-dates (by five days) OpenID. But would it be appropriate? Nobody wants their contributions to be lost. So I bear no ill-will toward Curry, and use this episode to caution people that the history of RSS and Web 2.0 and the rest is being written, not by the few stars trumpeted in the media, but by a cast of thousands. I am but one member of that cast, and so is Curry. And what we are building, together, along with everyone else building the internet, is the most amazing creation in human history - and that, in the end, is what matters. Rogers Candenhead, Workbench, December 2, 2005. [Link] [Tags: , , , , , , , ] [Previous][Next]

Comments

Re: Adam Curry Caught in Sticky Wiki

Anymouse, December 3, 2005

Stephen, thank you for your thoughts on this issue. From the start, there was always a firm belief that what was happening with rss enclosures was significantly different from scraping and audioblogging. Dave was very vocal about this as well. When editing the 'history' I didn't feel this was a significant contribution in the chronolgy as it did not influence me. But as I have stated publicly, having seen actual video of the session where Kevin Maks demo'd a system similar to what I built 8 months later, I have to revise my position on all of podcasting's history. Audioblogging had it's place in there as well. The process of 'truth' discovery through open wiki's seems pretty broken to me when I get 'outed' without some form of process among contributing editors with opposing views. So, an apology to you sir, you deserve to be documented as a part of this story. AC adam[at]curry.com [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: Adam Curry Caught in Sticky Wiki

Anymouse, December 3, 2005

This is the process Adam. Pioneering audioblogging info is in the wikipedia. You edit it away because you think "didn't influence me. couldn't be important." Not realizing all the software. all the ideas, and a lot of content were already on the scene. We just needed you to bring the greed and sellout. You got busted, welcome to the process. [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: Adam Curry Caught in Sticky Wiki

Stephen Downes, December 3, 2005

Thanks Adam, your comments are appreciated. [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

Re: Adam Curry Caught in Sticky Wiki

Anymouse, December 4, 2005

I like this whole shebang because it reminded me (and others) of EdRadio... something that did and does deserve to be noted, even if my reading academic articles was never the 'gripping' material I thought it might have been ;) James [Comment] [Permalink] [Previous][Next]

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