Sticky business

I can’t get this out of my head today. In his comment on the article by Steven Johnson, Jason Kottke writes that the “getting people to implement [a new de facto standard for feeding content from weblogs to search engines] will be hard,” and continues, “unless some major paradigm shift occurs in how people approach the Web, it’s not going to happen anytime soon.”

I’m not sure about that. Let’s say a new service like the one Johnson envisions should be launched today, allowing webloggers to submit their sites – providing that they are able to deliver such a feed, in the format specified by the service. I’m sure that it would take about an hour or two before submissions would be made.

Just look at how fast new ideas catch on and spread in the weblog world! Why would this be any different? However, if you want everybody to agree on a standard, it would probably take years. But if a few sane people could just establish a minimalistic first shot at the standard, and publish it, and let it evolve, it would happen quickly!