In praise of just doing it 

The newish TechCrunchIT blog gets another big-picture post this morning from Steve Gillmor about winds of change in the tech space.

If you take the trouble to read these -- first grab a fresh cup of coffee, turn down the TV and take your brain out of skim mode -- they'll have you dreaming up further examples of the broad ideas and branching off on your own in a "yeah, and also..." way.

Here's the bit that set me on that path:

But do users really want portability or just the utility of leveraging their identities and those of their peers around the Web with as much elasticity as possible.

Did the heavy handed Web Services Interoperability (WS-I) conspiracy between Microsoft and IBM really win the day, or lightweight easily consumable services such as RSS that almost a decade later now for the backbone of Microsoft’s forthcoming Mesh architecture. SOAP and REST, the rise of XMPP -- over and over again the inexorable drip drip drip of simple is as simple does keeps winning.

I think data portability and the elastic leveraging of identity may be two different styles of accomplishing about the same thing. Yes, RSS was sure to score, eventually, because of its simplicity and lightness of being. But also, expanding on the "drip drip drip" part, don't you think it's the willingness of people like Dave Winer to just start doing stuff that gets things off dead center?

The (too rare) Daves of the world don't especially care for standards bodies and getting together to talk about some future way to handle issues like identity. They just start making stuff. Then people can see the benefits in a way that will always win over some lofty summit on whatever topic. And developers and hackers make their own stuff to dovetail with it. And at some point when nobody is noticing that thing he just starting doing is all over the place and unstoppable.