Making mistakes in public

Earlier today, Mark Pilgrim took CNET to task for presuming to create YAML (Yet Another Markup Language). That was decidely not the case, but there was cause for confusion.

The culprit? An old feed, not RSS, which was mistakenly listed on the CNET Download.com RSS page and presented as if it were RSS, like the other feeds on the page. (Note: CNET Networks has many, many RSS feeds… start there and you should be able to find them all.)

Mark’s post and Tim Bray’s short note and Dave Winer’s post quickly drew attention from various folks. I asked someone to pull the links to the differently-formatted feeds and post a brief explanation while emailing Tim, Mark, and Dave. Thanks to Tim for acknowledging the correction, publicly and privately, and to Mark for pointing to Tim’s update.

This is the price to be paid for making mistakes in public. I guess I’m glad someone is paying close enough attention to call us on our mistakes. I’m sure we’ll make more! (Tangent: Bush couldn’t think of one mistake he’s made during the press conference last night? Not one?)

I must ask one thing, though… don’t you believe this “small pieces, loosely joined” world would spread even faster if the format(s) were named Hot RSS? (grin)
Mark’s faux badge is one step:
I’d go further, like the FeedBurner team: