Dave Winer went and did something clever, which is to say, a website where you can hand over your rss feed subscriptions as an OPML file so people can do statistics (i.e. figure out who's winning the popularity contest this week, affinity data, etc.).
So far, so good. He's announced an "SDK" which appears to amount to a couple of examples and a pointer to the raw data, as well what seems to be a license for the raw data (which does not have an explicit copyright or license included, not that matters, it's just unclear) that forbids sharing of the data in formats other than OPML without permission.
That last bit seems to have annoyed people, and even led Danny Ayers to request that Mr. Winer remove the links to his sites, which seems like a slight overreaction (short of pulling a Pilgrim), and for Winer to immediately raise the prospect of litigation, which seems like even more of an overreaction.
Ayers also came up with a way of (supposedly) transforming the data into valid simultaneously valid OPML and RDF, which also seems like an overreaction, if a kinda cool one. I think religious wars over file formats are even sillier than religious wars over editors. (I usually write these entries in emacs, but fix them in vi. :->) However, using a compilation license to promote your pet file format also seems deeply silly, especially when it stands a chance of fragmenting the market for subscription-list aggregators and causing everyone to lose. It's not like I know of any other formats for tossing feed subscription info around in (although I suppose you can do it with RDF, but if you believe the RDF boosters, it also walks dogs). It would seem cleverer just to let the market decide and not do things that might offend your target demographic.
I find this all fairly amusing, since I imagined (for lack of a better word) this service a few months before Winer said anything about it. It counts for nothing, because I didn't bother to tell anyone, and didn't have the time or bag of tricks handy to implement it before Winer did at any rate.
I, personally am not going to submit my subscriptions to feeds.scripting.com, because I don't have a good tool for manipulating OPML and thus no good way of marking the feeds that I (for whatever reason) don't want to share. I'm also not thrilled by the notion of contributing to someone else's crusade, but I wasn't going to contribute before I found out about the crusade anyway.
Next, social networks, public keys, and some applications I'd find useful. I should also start keeping statistics on how often I actually meet my plans for the next entry. :->
