What did I get myself into?!

["James Shaw" <yahoo@coveryourasp.com>]

I've looked back at the recent posts, and I'm amazed what goes on 
here and in the (as they're called here) "other" groups.

A few of you posted messages about me and my efforts with STORS.org 
recently, so I thought I'd tell the short story. I write articles on 
my ASP web site and publish them by submitting title, description, 
URL and various other details to directory sites like aspin.com, 
devdex.com, etc where they categorize them. Readers follow their 
links to my site. OK, so that's where I'm coming from.

My gripe was that everyone's form was different, some you can't even 
paste into! So on April 19th I proposed a *very* simple idea of 
everyone using the same names for their form inputs. Within a week 
there was an XML schema, a discussion list and a website.

No-one mentioned RSS, and development was accelerating. Now, 3 weeks 
since the original form idea STORS.org publishes source code for 
publishers to create an XML file and directory sites to read it when 
the XML (or more likely a URL to the XML) is submitted on a standard 
form.

More and more people offered to port my code to other languages and 
platforms, and we were ready to make the big announcement that 
STORS.org was live (scheduled for 2 days from now). And then I get an 
email from Alis.

Much head scratching and frantic reading about RSS ensued. The 3 main 
people behind STORS, me Steve Smith (ASPAlliance) and Pedro Pequeno 
(Aspin) decided to change tack and instead use the established RSS, 
which by all accounts was extensible enough even if we wanted a few 
tweaks.

2 days later and I'm stunned to see the political nightmare we've 
stepped into. I've subscribed to 4 discussion lists so far. This one, 
reallySimpleSyndication, rss2 and rss-dev. 

I'd really like to keep the momentum going and get my new site up 
with code for everyone to use. Quickly. I'm not sure I want to go 
back in the archives to find out where the split(s) occured, or why. 

I guess I was just hoping that a 2 year old effort was slick, 
polished, with lots of documentation, sample code in every 
conceivable language and more to the point, an "RSS.org" that was 
running it. (Actually the RDF Site Summary 1.0 docs are very 
impressive)

What am I missing? Feel free to email me offlist if you prefer: 
james@coveryourasp.com