Burning bridges

I’m done talking about RSS (originally RDF Site Summary, then Rich Site Summary, then Really Simple Syndication – gopod only knows what it stands for now). It’s been made clear to me that my interlocution in the increasingly unhelpful RSS debates is unwelcome, and I’ve started tasting bile and feeling the urge to utter “a pox on (all) your houses.”
I generally don’t cast aspersions on the integrity of virtual strangers, for who am I to get inside their heads and explain their motivations? I expect the same courtesy in response – the respect that comes from assuming that my own comments are true expressions of my own reactions, thoughts, feelings, and interpretations.
I don’t believe I have anything to contribute to the RSS debate, and I don’t believe it will ever be resolved. I do think that the many flavors of RSS have a head start over any potential new vendor-neutral format (for all of the pertinent aspects of weblogging) that may arise, but I feel that the effort is worth the while, sysiphean as it may turn out to be, and I’d like to put my shoulder under that rock along with the others trying to work out a roadmap forward, built on learning the lessons of the past.
This means I will try to contribute to the “what is a weblog?” discussion and to the Wiki Sam Ruby is hosting, as soon as I have anything of value to contribute. I’ll also do what I can do to support and adopt the format the emerges, if at all possible. Of course I’ll continue to have RSS feeds for my various sites, as long as necessary.
The best outcome, as I see it, of this new effort, would be a single conceptual model that – by underlying a common syndication, archiving, and editing format – would deliver the holy grail of weblog interoperability: seamless migration from one vendor’s tool to another.
Since that has been one of my issues all along (I believe one of my first posts to RFB spoke about the importance of interop in this area), I think I’ll start experimenting with a project I’ve put off for a long time, given the difficulties. I will attempt to migrate all of my blogs from their current applications to different ones, to document the difficulties in doing so and to clarify my ideas of how migrationg should work. Naturally, I’ll report on my progress and setbacks in this space.