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RSS Web-Feeds, The Next Big Thing?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun Feb 29, 2004 12:36 PM
from the three-years-late dept.
from the three-years-late dept.
mi writes "Yahoo! carries an Associated Press editorial
about RSS-based news feeds, and how they are pushing the spam-ridden e-mail and advertising-ridden web-pages aside and consolidate information from multiple sites. Slashdot itself is mentioned by the author as one of his sources." We've been exporting our headlines practically since the beginning. (note that RSS link in the footer). I still think the problem with RSS is the name. It sounds stupid. Let's all call it 'Speed Feed'. Cheesy rhyming will help the non techno elite remember it, and this is a technology that needs to be more widely deployed. (It's also worth noting that Slashdot's RSS feed will have more article contents for subscribers in a few weeks)
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God I hope so. (Score:5, Informative)
Kudos Slashdot. Hiss to CNN.
Re:God I hope so. (Score:5, Interesting)
RSS, and indeed the whole WWW (including blog) style of communication is a lot worse than the mail/usenet style in that it is basically one-way. If you get your news as an RSS feed, that's it - you just consume what others prepared, without an easy and effective possibility to reply, without the chance for a fair peer-to-peer discussion, and in particular without the chance to publish such stories yourself (of course, you can technically do that, only that nobody will subscribe to your private RSS feed, so you are basically invisible)
Spam and worms are not the problem IMHO, they are trivial to handle. Trolls you have anywhere, and they can be dealt with easily as well. The benefits of a fair mode of multi-way communication far outweight these annoyances. It is a general trend to view web-based services as inherently better than other, often older, internet services which is common at least since the start of september [catb.org] - take web forums vs. usenet for example, the web stuff tends to have tons of useless gizmos but be less usable for the actual task, communication. And it shows in the quality of the discussions taking place.
It is a little like the difference between the model of democracy where issues were discussed on the market place of Athens between all citizens (not that many inhabitants of Athens counted as citizens, but that is a different issue...) and the one where the citizens get to vote for a representative every few years. RSS is the TV of online communication.
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Re:God I hope so. (Score:5, Insightful)
Completely false. You are free to reply, you are free to publish that reply, and there are sites [technorati.com] that will help people who care find your reply, even if the original source doesn't ever point to you.
Your problem is...
of course, you can technically do that, only that nobody will subscribe to your private RSS feed, so you are basically invisible)
You seem to think that you have some sort of right to be heard... that if ABC News publishes an article and you have some comment that you have some sort of right to make ABC News distribute your opinion on the same footing as their own. This is flatly false. They may acknowlege your opinion or not as they see fit.
The true benefit of the RSS-style of communication is that it provides you with a channel of communication that is yours. Your RSS file has no trolls. Your RSS file has no spam. Thus, if people care about your opinions (or whatever you are posting), they can subscribe with confidence to your feed. The technology exists then to bring your content to those who are interesting.
Odds are, you won't get thousands or millions of subscribers. That's because, odds are, you aren't one out of a million. I say this as someone who has had a feed since Jan. 2000 and have not exactly raked in the fame. However, this is the way it is.
It's not like the alternatives are any better. Do you actually read the feedback forums on ABC News? Sure, I do intermittently, but there's just no way around the fact that when you create that "right of reply", it's flooded and you can't help but be uninterested in it.
Fundamentally, you see this "one-way communication", but what you don't see is that (nearly) all communication is one way. You are not allowed to modify this message, but you can post a reply. You are not allowed to modify somebody else's RSS feed, but you can post a reply. The fact that I don't have to read every last schmoe's reply to some article, but only get the ones from the people I care about, is a feature, not a bug.
The ideal communication technology is a compromise between the readers and the writers. RSS feeds are one of the best we've created so far, with low binding on both the writer's and the reader's side. (Even posted an unpopular opinion and been deluged in hate mail? Unless you're a sociopath it gets old. RSS is one of the few ways for a writer to be able to deal with that, because they are not forced to read the flames in the same forum they themselves are posting in.) In the end, RSS-based communities are one of the best matches to the real principles of free speech: That you can say whatever you like, and people are free to read whatever they like, and there is no binding between the two: You do not have the right to be heard, and you do not have the right to censor anyone else, even by "shouting them down". In this way, RSS feeds surpass even real-world communication.
Practically speaking, it is undeniable that this plays out as I've described, and not as you've described. I've participated in many conversations via RSS, so I have empirical proof they exist, no matter how you might theorize that they don't. And plenty of people comment on all sort of things, many of whom I find interesting and many of whom I don't. You obviously don't use it, if you have so many misconceptions.
RSS is the exact opposite of TV on the web. Everybody gets to compete on a level playing ground for attention, and is rewarded according to their social merits. Some people don't like this and prefer forums where they (falsely) think this doesn't apply. Even the big networks and newspapers don't have much adv
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Re:God I hope so. (Score:5, Interesting)
So what?
I get lots of entertainment and useful information from my television. That we have two-way communication systems doesn't invalidate the use for one-way communication systems. For certain areas (news reporting, entertainment), on the whole I'd rather that the content creators spent more time creating better information (better news, better entertainment), than engaging in two way communication with their audience.
As a replacement for email and usenet, RSS is clearly inferior. But as a replacement for checking the dozen or so news, commentary, and comic sites I visit almost daily, RSS is clearly superior.
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Re:God I hope so. (Score:5, Informative)
Ummmm they do.
For example I have the following two feeds in my snownews [kcore.de] aggregator:
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Re:God I hope so. (Score:5, Interesting)
Bullshit. Try it. Slashdot's ridiculous RSS restrictions are not only excessively draconian, but also buggy, frequently tagging non-offenders.
All this, for a small RSS file on a website that gets millions of hits to its graphical front page per day. What crack are they smoking?
Perhaps anyone wanting to automate the listing of slashdot stories should write a parser for the Slashdot frontpage instead, since clearly that is not subject to pointless draconian restrictions. Have it download images to
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Re:God I hope so. (Score:5, Funny)
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RSS Readers (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:RSS Readers (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:RSS Readers (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:RSS Readers (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:RSS Readers (Score:5, Informative)
No guarantee that this will work for anybody else, but it DID just work for me.
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Re:RSS Readers (Score:5, Informative)
I wish all webcomics used it. Even better, consolidate all my webcomics into a single news feed. Then consolidate all the geek news into another, blogs in another, software updates in another and real news in the last one. Then have a program that makes noise when something new comes up.
Life would be sweet.
If you don't have an RSS feed, get one!
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Re:RSS Readers (Score:4, Informative)
It's online, free and includes a host of other features such as exportable subscriptions, disposable email addresses, etc.
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Re:RSS Readers (Score:5, Informative)
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NewsMonster or AmphetaDesk (Score:5, Informative)
Here are my recommendations for RSS/news readers for Windows (and other platforms):
If you use the Mozilla [mozilla.org] browser, NewsMonster [newsmonster.org] is a great RSS add-on. It is cross-platform, and the basic version is free and open source. (There is a Pro version with a bunch more features for a fee.) It installs as a second sidebar in the Mozilla browser, and you can read feeds like you read email in most email clients. It also installs with about twenty popular feeds to get you started. It has a few bugs, but it is my favorite one overall.
Another one is AmphetaDesk [disobey.com]. It is also free, open source, and cross-platform. It displays all your feeds in a web page in your browser. It runs in the Windows taskbar, checking ever so often for updates. It's not as powerful as other RSS readers--it's not easy to tell which feeds and articles are new/updated, for instance--but it is rock-solid with no bugs that I've ever found.
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Re:RSS Readers (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to embed RSS in your own home page(or any HTML page) like I have done on http://bhavesh.freeshell.org/news.html [freeshell.org] then you can use http://zvonnews.sourceforge.net/zfeeder.php [sourceforge.net]
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Re:RSS Readers (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:RSS Readers (Score:5, Interesting)
Makes my skin crawl.
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Speed Read? (Score:4, Insightful)
They're missing the point (Score:5, Funny)
Commercialisation is next :-( (Score:5, Interesting)
Consider what you use the internet for, and how it's changed:
The more-successful protocols - those that actually deliver information are those left commercially-free. FTP is pretty basic, but you get what you want and nothing else. Usenet news has flamewars galore, but the limitations on what can be posted in non-binary groups actually seem to work well.
When I first started using the web, I set up a website for my image-processing postgrad group. We emailed CERN to let them know there was another website on the net
Simon
It's happening already (Score:5, Informative)
Me [west-third.com] on the subject.
Tom Murphy [natterjackpr.com] has written extensively on this as well, although his site lacks a search engine so you have to rummage around for relevant articles.
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RSSSSS Feed (Score:4, Funny)
Yess...
we wantssss it...
RSSSS feed...our precioussss....
RSS acronym (Score:4, Interesting)
2) Really Simple Syndication????
Which one is correct?
Re:RSS acronym (Score:5, Informative)
the specs [harvard.edu] say
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Bloglines - the perfect web service for RSS reader (Score:5, Informative)
Developed by the same person who started Egroups, Bloglines offers the ability to manage your feeds through a simple interface available anywhere.
The power also includes:
1) Disposable email addresses.
2) Sharing of your feeds.
3) Exporting of feeds.
4) Routing email to your account.
A great, free service.
The future of the web? (Score:5, Interesting)
XML syndication is great but there are several drawbacks:
The standards wars: RSS 0.9 vs RSS 1.0 vs RSS 2.0 vs Atom. As a provider if I want to reach as many people as possible I will have to provide 4 different formats! (RSS 2.0 should be readable by RSS 0.9 readers but you never know).
The bad client implementations: repeat after me: 304 Modified. If you consume XML/RSS, make sure your client supports 304 Modified responses, and provides Last Modified and ETags. Otherwise, you're wasting my bandwidth, and I'll have to ban your customers (which I don't want to do!).
RSS is less two-way than HTML: a lot (not all definitely) of the RSS clients make it hard to interact with the authoring site, much more so than plain HTML and a browser. Fortunately, this is changing.
IMHO, RSS is a good first attempt at a truly automated, interactive Web experience. But the killer apps will have to wait for better technology and infrastructure...
So when will Slash fix their RSS feed? (Score:5, Interesting)
you can get rss feeds for the sections (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think this is correct. I just loaded the Science page
I don't know if viewing the "slashdot" rss feed and then the "slashdot - science" rss feed counts as 2 refreshes for the "banned from RSS" rule. At this point, I've only had an RSS reader for about 10 minutes. Still not banned from
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What's so great about RSS? (Score:5, Interesting)
It basically serves up headlines. It's pretty useless without conventional HTML/CSS behind it.
My concern is that once it REALLY takes off there are going to be millions of people running RSS harvesting programs 24 hours a day. That means servers having to respond to all these behind the scenes inquiries for data that is almost NEVER going to be looked at.
This sounds like something that could be done a lot more efficiently by the likes of Google. They scan everything anyway, no reason they can't summarize much of it too (and they are starting to do this).
And I still don't see how RSS will end Spam. Most legitimate advertisers have stopped using Spam already. The con artists who still Spam know that there are an endless supply of suckers. The only thing that will end e-mail Spam will be to either end e-mail, or create laws that will make e-mail useless.
Re:What's so great about RSS? (Score:5, Informative)
The original standard was so lenient (on purpose) that the quality of feeds is inconsistent at best.
RSS also piggy-backs on HTTP for authentication, modifications (304s), etc. This is great in theory, but in practice it has meant that every RSS client author has thrown together their homebrewed RSS client from an HTTP library without doing authentication, modification-checking, gzip compression, charset encodings, etc, etc, etc. It literally would have been preferrable for an HTSP (HyperText Syndication Protocol) to come out, just to force developers to use well-thought-out and well-behaved syndication libraries.
RSS is not NNTP (unfortunately): there is no interactivity, unless you provide additional controls to the subscribers somehow (memigo uses a frame-over) which is not consistent from site to site. Hacks like TrackBack are only half-way measures...
Related to the above: RSS provides meta-data only from the publisher side, NOT the reader side. Well, the vast majority of people are readers, not writers, and their meta-data vanish into clickthrus... sites like memigo try to fix that (by using implict ratings, page-read trackers, etc) but those are still kludges around the underlying technology...
In short, RSS is a good 1.0 technology, gopher waiting for HTTP...
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Re:What's so great about RSS? (Score:5, Interesting)
Take my Bloglines feeds [bloglines.com] for example. There's no way I could keep track of 100+ sites continuously without RSS. It gives me full text of updates for most sites (Slashdot, of course, is broken) that I read when I want to know what's new.
And most RSS readers support HTML/CSS. Images too. Just so you know, so the next time you bash RSS you can do it with a little information behind you.
Also, the bandwidth concerns are minimal for RSS aggregators that support 304 Modified headers, ETags, and If-Modified-Since headers. And I predict that by the end of the year the community will make a common practice of banning those aggregators that don't support them.
As for the Spam angle, I think you mis-read the article. RSS won't end Spam, it will provide people who use email for legitimate broadcast reasons (email newsletters, etc) to get around Spam blockers. And people will prefer this method because they know they can unsubscribe at any time.
Seriously though, RSS is like TiVo for the web. You hear a lot of zealots talk about how cool it is, when it's obvious from their description that it's nothing special. Then, when you try it (like with Bloglines [bloglines.com], the free aggregator I use) you realize just how powerful and revolutionary it is.
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RSS has bandwith problems. (Score:5, Insightful)
If a site exposes an RSS feed, and 50,000 people subscribe to that feed and refresh that feed every 10 minutes, you get 3mil requests for that feed per hour, you can do the math yourself how much bandwith that consumes if the feed is larger than a couple of bytes.
If you crank out an email with the headlines each day to these 50,000 subscribers, you save bandwith in most cases.
What should be done is that the RSS client first asks the rss feed server if the feed has changed past a given date/time. If not, no fetch is done. Correct me if this is already the case, but I fear it isn't (most rss feeds are dynamically produced, (perhaps with cached contents) so a simple HTTP poll won't do.)
Re:RSS has bandwith problems. (Score:5, Informative)
Plus, quite a few aggregators coming out these days are based on Mark Pilgrim's Universal Feed Parser [diveintomark.org], which is one of the most well-behaved aggregator backends out there.
And finally, for aggregators which understand certain of the namespaced extensions developed for RSS 1.0, there are the <sy:updatePeriod> and <sy:updateFrequency> elements from the syndication module [resource.org], which allow you to tell the aggregator how often it should poll your feed.
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THE BEST WEB EVER: Pretend you have a PDA (Score:5, Informative)
Even though I have a 3.2 GHz box with 2 gigs of RAM and a ATI 9800 TX with 256 mb RAM... yes, Battlefield is awesome at 6xAA, 1200x1000, at ~110 FPS :) back on topic... I will always browse the web using the PDA links if available.
IT'S NOTHING SHORT OF AWESOME. All my sites load instantly, no adverts or maybe just one, and everything is plain text with links underlined, and only a picture or two of whats really relevant. And when I do browse the web on my Treo 600, I see the exact same thing. Lean and mean and consistent.
Here are some links... enjoy!
Slashdot: no special link, just change your settings!
Wired: www.wired.com/news_drop/palmpilot
C|Net (for the M$ fanboyz): cnet.vitalstream.com
MSNBC: www.msnbc.com/avantgo/mmc.asp
BBC: news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm
New York Post: www.nypost.com/avantgo/index.htm
Google (yes, even leaner!!!): www.google.com/palm
Re:THE BEST WEB EVER: Pretend you have a PDA (Score:5, Informative)
MapQuest: mapquest.com/pda/
ITN (ITV News): avantgo.itn.co.uk/
PC World: pcworld.com/avantgo/
The Onion: mobile.theonion.com/
Wired: wired.com/news/avantgo/
Washington Post (not easy to find):
http://media.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dy
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Top 100 Feeds (Score:5, Informative)
Speed Feed LOL! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:forget speed feed... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:forget speed feed... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:That's great, Taco. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:That's great, Taco. (Score:5, Interesting)
I got myself banned a little while ago when I discovered that each section of
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Re:That's great, Taco. (Score:4, Informative)
I've noticed that over the last few months, full-text feeds have become more common. Slashdot should really join the fun.
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Re:Is this not just "push"? (Score:5, Informative)
It's all pull.
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Re:Is this not just "push"? (Score:4, Interesting)
But shhhh, don't tell anyone.
PointCast was a horrible implementation of the idea, but functionally 'identical'. ('push' never was 'push', and PointCast happened to be the agregator. The basic feed and premise was RSS based.
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Re:Slashdot Poll, obviously! (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not sure what it should be called, but if it ever catches on, about 3 years later it will suck and be called "Microsoft News".
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Re:um (Score:5, Interesting)
See, this is what I don't get...
You re implying that when some news site adds a headline it send a magic RSS signal that wakes up your computer. This would be pretty cool if it were true.
Of course, if it were true, the same people who Spam would be waking up your computer about a thousand times a second to tell you about Viagra!
RSS is abbreviated HTML (the irony here is that the original HTML syntax was more efficient than todays RSS).
Add, to that the fact that you think this RSS data is being "Sent" to you somehow, when in actuality, something you are running is probably hitting those poor news servers once a minute looking for updates. Even if you go on vacation for 2 weeks leaving your computer turned on, you'll be hitting those servers 20160 times looking for an update.
There is nothing magic about this, rather something very tragic. We've made web browsing so complex and inefficient that we have to invent a new thing to make it simpler again. Only problem is that RSS doesn't replace HTML, it only augments it. You still have to click on those headlines to get the full story, which will take you to the Slashdot page where you will see ALL of the stories, plus headlines from hundreds of other servers that have just now been impacted (plus the fact that your client proggy is hitting those same servers as well).
We seem to have forgotten that the slow part of the man/computer interface is man. Having thousands of feeds updated silently in the background while we watch TV doesn't really make us that much more aware. Just makes us feel like we have accomplished more.
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Think bigger and check out the spec. (Score:5, Interesting)
RSS is a simple simple thing, much like XML is a simple simple thing.
If you check out the spec [harvard.edu] for it, you'll notice that there is room for lots of handy info. This in it self may not convice you, as you said, how does this beat going to the site and looking for yourself?
There are two primary benefits: 1. Your site can be syndicated or you can sydicate other sites easily! I can put Slashdot headlines in a box on my site for my users to click on! Neat stuff!! Making machines able to homogeneously deal with this data is a big plus.
That brings me to RSS agregators. Unlike a PHP script which will simply snag and update a display on your home page (as suggested above) you can have a window on your desktop with a list of sites in it. Click on the site and you get the headlines without the overhead of graphics, silly scripts, and graphics. It is a matter of taste, but I absolutly love this technology! I have a bunch of blogs and news sites that I try to stay on top of and it's very annoying to open up 20 tabs in FireFox when I can use the FireFox RSS plug in to brows them in a side bar as a list. I ussually have 20 tabs open anyway and this is a great way for me to get my news.
Also, as the article mentions, how can you spam me via this unless the company directly injects the advertisement as one of their headlines? Email is push method while this is a pull method. Pull methods mean that the client can stop pulling, so if spam shows up in my slashdot.rdf, I 'll stop using it.
Hope this is helpful!
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Not that amusing (Score:5, Insightful)
You *still* have to visit the original web page in order to acess the actual content/information. Headlines and summaries are neither content, nor information.
Headlines and summaries are information. Yes, you have to go to the site if you want detailed information but this is not always necessary. It's like skimming through a newspaper by reading headlines and first paragraphs (the latter of which should give you the core details, if the journalist is writing appropriately). You don't have to read the entire newspaper front to back; you skim through and can get the gist of what's going on, without delving into details. And if something does strike your eye, you take the time to [read the article|view the Web site].
A perfect example is how I "read" eWeek via the Zinio digital reader. I look through the table of contents, which includes very short snippets (less than what many RSS feeds offer) that describe the article. Sometimes that's all I do -- if nothing catches my interest, or I don't have time, then at least I have a bare minimum knowledge of things going on in the industry. If I have more time, or if something very interesting is listed, then I click over and read the article.
An RSS feed works the same way. It provides minimal information, from which you can make the decision about whether or not you want to obtain detailed information.
Or, using the example of the RSS feeds provided by the Open Music Registry, the feed lets you know when new music is listed, but there's no need to listen to every new title -- just those that catch your interest. Even if you don't listen to them, you still are aware -- i.e., you've gained the information -- that new music is available. (There's also a site news RSS feed, and each news item is often small enough to fit into the RSS summary, in which case you get all of the content via that feed.)
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