I read Dave Winer’s post about Wikipedia edits with some interest, particularly the part about his edits to the RSS topic, a topic which has been politicized in the past. He writes:

Then I decided to look at the RSS page to see if it linked to the RSS 2.0 spec. It didn't, so I added a link. I haven't been back to see if that has been reverted.

It surprised me that the RSS page wouldn’t link to the spec, so I went and checked it out. Sure enough, I saw Dave’s edit linking the spec into the article, and then someone else taking his edit out.

Curious as to why someone would make the change, I looked at the article and found that there actually was a pointer to an RSS 2.0 spec. But where Dave was pointing to the Berkman spec page, the Specifications section links to the RSS Board spec page.

The point that grabbed me first, of course, is that the RSS Board is making transparent some minor edits that have happened to the spec over time (I wouldn’t have told you that there had been eight revisions of the RSS 2.0 spec). But the other point that caught my interest is the nature of Dave’s change that was reverted. Dave put an external link into the body of a Wikipedia entry. Most Wikipedia entries I’ve seen put external links in a subsection at the end of an article. Two very different philosophies of linking. Dave’s is bloglike, where the external link adds immediate context; Wikipedia’s is ... well, weird. I’m not sure why one would separate out that content, except to say that “This is information that is to be treated differently from the main article.” But, Wikipedia being Wikipedia, one doesn’t have to guess at the intentions of the site. There is a general External links policy and a Manual of Style for links. The main thrust appears to be that only external links that function as sources of article information (i.e. footnotes) appear within the article, while other links appear in a ghetto.

Obvious? No. Does it make sense that Wikipedia has evolved this way? Maybe. What it reminds me more than anything else is that Wikipedia is a group of individuals that have evolved collective guidelines and practices for managing a common resource, that they are in fact a community with different practices and standards than the blogging community. I think the blogging way is right and the false objectivity of Wikipedia is going to be problematic over time. But that’s not the direction Wikipedia has gone and I suppose we should respect that.

It’s not every day that you hear about a new business plan, without a company around it.

Anyone want to work on RSS-I with me?

I’m looking forward to seeing Dave Winer’s next trick. The clues (the space above his couch, an RSS feed with medium to high resolution images) suggest that he’s preparing a new application that reformats the image content of RSS for widescreen displays—with the original application being news images. Am I close, Dave?

I’d happily get on board this train if I’m right and if it’s easy to get working—and doesn’t require a Windows Media PC.

Color me careless, but slightly funkier: the RSS feed on the new Funky16Corners web site is, in fact, set up as a podcast, with proper enclosures and everything. You may want to subscribe if you have a yen for funk that tastes so good it like to make your tongue beat your brains out, as my pan-Southern uncle would say. (Well, not about funk, but anyway.)

Best track so far on today’s Funky16Corners Radio: “I’m Mr. Big Stuff (Big Deal),” the “answer” record to Jean Knight’s “Mr. Big Stuff” (of Burger King commercial fame).

With the new photocasting capability of the just announced iPhoto update from Apple, which uses RSS as a medium for photo subscriptions, Apple has turned a corner, and so has RSS. I think the day of the monolithic aggregator may be coming to an end. The direction is now toward contextual RSS: feeds of information showing up in applications where they make the most sense. There is no question that iTunes provides a superior experience for subscribing to podcasts--with clear, built-in controls for managing playback and machinery in the form of smart playlists for organizing content.

The other side: Apple is now clearly committed to using RSS as a sharing technology across the Internet, and providing innovative new user experiences for RSS usage. Today's announcement is in some ways a bigger deal than the iTunes podcasting support. There Apple was hopping on a phenomenon that someone else had created. Today it's using RSS and the podcasting phenomenon to enrich the sharing experience for its customers.

There's just one sour note--the out-of-box ability to publish an RSS feed of your own photos from iPhoto requires a paid .Mac subscription. But the same has always been true for the out-of-box ability to publish your own photos to the Web, and it hasn't stopped innovative developers from creating plugins to allow publishing to arbitrary destinations. And the content that gets published to .Mac is just plain RSS. While I'll be interested to see what extensions got plopped on this time, this is still really positive.

Update: Even more positive, since you can use iMovie to create video podcasts.