Hi Gavin, Thanks for the post. I would agree that something doesn't have to be a standard or worked through a standards organization to get critical mass of adoption. Many approved standards - in fact the majority of them - never get a critical mass of adoption. So, the point I would make is that it's a question of where you can get the right parties involved so they will adopt it. This is probably more important than if there is an existing standard already or not. A Google has such a huge market share and so many partners that follow their lead that they can create a snowball of adoption. This is why a large market-share leader generally needs to be convinced as to why they should spend time in standards organizations when they can dictate the actions of a large portion of the market.
My point relates to the educational open source efforts to date in that they have relatively small market influence and benefit greatly in a standards organization if it has enough participants to create that snowball effect.
I wasn't familiar with the history of RSS - I found this site - can't vouch for its accuracy: http://www.rssspecifications.com/history-rss.htm
The way I read the history is that Netscape had a major role in RSS in the 1997 and 1999 era. Although Netscape dropped it, they were a very big dog in that time period and their efforts on it certainly signaled that it could be important to the market.
So, in a way, you are right that it certainly made its way without Google or a standards organization. On the other hand, it supports my argument as well in that there probably was fairly rapid adoption by the major browsers because they had been looking into this already and needed a solution.
Thanks again - you made a great point there . . . Best, Rob
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