More reaction to the dialog about Echo yesterday:
- Ole Eichhorn says I “weighed in on the side of common sense” yesterday. More importantly, he articulates what I tried to, which was that “web plumbing is a lot less interesting than web content, anyway.” Meaning, for me, two things: the web content area is where I need to continue to spend my time—both writing it and making scripts that work one layer up from the APIs to enable people to publish their content; and that the Echo project needs to consider what needs to happen for the people that have invested in the existing infrastructure in non-trivial ways to have an incentive to migrate. I’m not talking about bloggers so much as I am about big content providers, platform builders, and aggregator developers. Who on Echo can articulate the non-technical value proposition of what they’re doing? (To be clear: I believe there is a real value proposition, and I’m working to try to tease it out. It’s just that I haven’t heard it articulated yet. The page everyone keeps pointing to talks about the wires and the politics.)
- Speaking of value prop, Charles Cook notes that there may be international character set issues with MetaWeblogAPI. Is this true? I don’t see anything a priori documented that says only 7-bit ASCII or encoded ASCII is allowed; XML is Unicode, after all. Brent might know…
- Scoble is skeptical that Echo is going to go anywhere, but he’s open to being surprised.