My Genius Ignored

It hurts… it hurts! See, it’s all just a popularity contest! If I was an international jetset techie-nerd who went to conferences, people might actually listen to me… But Nooooo, no no no…

Even Brent, yes, Brent, who I conversed with on mailing lists and the like back in the mid-1990’s… Witness this:

It was Adam who convinced us to add support for enclosures and podcasts to NetNewsWire. It was a major feature request last fall, lots of people were asking for it, but it was finally a short email from Adam that was the tipping point. He said it seemed like it would be a “slam-dunk” for us. Who could resist that? Not me.

That’s from June 2005, but let’s go back to August 2004, where I said in regards to podcasting and NetNewsWire:

(Honestly, I think NetNewsWire could kick butt in this area, it’s a Mac OS X application that could tie directly into iTunes quite easily, and Brent could do it all with a great interface Brent, you listening?)

Oh wait, gosh – what is that? I also mention the idea of enclosures in Atom!

Oh, both Adam and Dave wondered about enclosures in Atom and assumed Atom must have something similar, but every time I ask, no one seems to have a good answer. Maybe this will help poke the Atom folks a bit.

That link to the Atom mailing list is dated March 2004, well before what would widely be considered the “birth of podcasting” probably because I was already running my own code to download enclosures from the (very) few RSS 2.0 Feeds (with enclosures) that existed at the time… I was amazed that no one influential in the Atom community thought enclosures would be important or useful enough to follow up on. Over a year later I’m still asking about enclosures in Atom with no clear answers.

Some days it just doesn’t pay to start typing.

(P.S. Can I have my pony now?)