Watching the principals involved go back and forth over RSS 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, whatever.0, is certainly entertaining. Imagine what these people could do if they didn’t have to spend all that time fighting with each other?
Anyway, le’affair RSS has devolved into threats of lawsuits, discussion of doing Winer’s bad ticker in with bad food, and other assorted silliness.
Now, I don’t know much about (actually I don’t know anything) about the various technical issues surrounding RSS, but I do have a little experience with media ethics. And for once I find myself in complete agreement with Winer — this story about RSS aggregators for The Guardian is the sort of thing that would result in someone getting fired at most newspapers (at any respectable newspaper).
As Winer notes, this is more advertising than news copy and the author praises people in the article whom he has a relationship with. You can get away with writing puff pieces about your friends at some college newspapers, but at most newspapers that would be strictly forbidden.
Winer writes,
The Guardian requests an apology. For what? They ran a tainted review. [Ben] Hammersley is a participant in the debate over the future of syndication technology, yet he wrote a review for the Guardian where that was not disclosed. Now, either Hammersley didn’t tell them, or they don’t care, or British newspapers run ads without saying they’re ads. Whatever it is, this whole thing stinks. How dare they bully me into silence.
Winer’s absolutely right. Either Hammersley didn’t disclose or The Guardian thought it was irrelevant. Either way it’s lousy journalism.