RSS was invented at Netscape with no involvement by Winer. Most informed people starting fresh today would tend to prefer the Atom format.

"XML-RPC, SOAP, OPML"

Some of the "interesting ideas" that I acknowledged. Most people today would prefer REST if possible, although there is a lot of legacy and enterprise stuff that uses, especially, SOAP. OPML is obviously useful, if obvious.

"arguably podcasts were first implemented by Winer"

Automatically downloadable audio files were already in place in several forms before Winer got involved, including subscriptions. Winer and Curry implemented RSS enclosures and used them to deliver audio files. This is an implementation of the existing podcast concept using RSS, and probably helped make podcasting more popular.

The RSS spec is something that a motivated high school student could come up with in a couple of hours. Why grown men consider it an accomplishment and argue about who should get the credit is embarrassing. The real value comes in building a consensus to create an accepted standard. Did Winer do more to help this process along, or to obstruct it? What about stunts like making trivial changes to an existing spec and slapping Userland's copyright on it? What effect did that have on helping to establish the RSS spec as a standard? Edit: The Atom format owes its existence mainly to the desire to create a work-alike that avoids the RSS version mess, which resulted from Winer's antics. Mark Pilgrim early on defined Atom as "RSS without the sociopaths."

And I referred to "products" as flops; you mentioned standards and protocols. The products I'm referring to are Radio and its many precursors and descendants. Do you think that any of these products were successful?