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Google Businesses The Internet

Google Finally Moves Toward RSS Standard 212

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-miss-ultramode dept.
declan writes "My News.com colleague Evan Hansen just got his hands on an internal email thread revealing that Google is planning to embrace RSS. Evan's co-authored News.com article quotes from the email (sent to Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt) confirming that Google is rethinking only supporting Atom. Slashdot covered Google's purchase of Pyra Labs and Blogger.com/Blogspot.com last year that made it a fan of the Atom standard. Does this news mean that RSS is now viewed as out of Dave Winer's control? Will RSS and Atom finally converge?"
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Google Finally Moves Toward RSS Standard More

Google Finally Moves Toward RSS Standard

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  • You'd think... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Short Circuit ( 52384 ) <mikemol@gmail.com> on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:21PM (#9392336) Homepage Journal
    ...it'd become an RFC at some point.

    • Re:You'd think... (Score:5, Informative)

      by joeldg ( 518249 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:41PM (#9392515) Homepage
      At this point everything is "proposed" and saying these are not "protocols" and just "vocabularies" and RFC is not appropriate.

      There are some geek-muscles being flexed about in RDF/RSS and people want to maintain control over it (same with FOAF, which I am dealing with often) that is why the Atom guys came up with their own, it is a rewrite they came up with that addressed problems they had been reporting/asking for fixes for (or at least extensions for) for quite a while to no avail.

      Anyway, it is a big pissing contest still, if google jumps in and picks a side, it is game over.

      • Re:You'd think... (Score:5, Informative)

        by ScumericanNazi ( 677497 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @06:35PM (#9392948)
        RFC stands for Request For Comment.

        An RFC does NOT have to be a standard, it does NOT have to be binding. It CAN be a memo about an idea that you want others to COMMENT on, it CAN be a proposal for which you are REQUESTING others people's COMMENTS.

        Hence, the statement "RFC is not appropriate" is incorrect.

        • Re:You'd think... (Score:5, Informative)

          by joeldg ( 518249 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @07:37PM (#9393413) Homepage
          umm..
          I was not going to respond to this.. but just in case someone else might happen to think you are correct for some strange reason.

          If you actually poke around in RFC's you might notice that languages generally don't have them (markup does, but XML which is what RDF/RSS/Atom is built on already has an RFC).
          Poke around http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/ and see, you are generally trying to have top-level projects for RFC's, not a subproject.

          RSS is a vocabulary built on XML and therefore would never warrant an RFC.

          • Re:You'd think... (Score:2, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward
            but he is correct. an RFC is a request for comments. you can put them out for just about anything you want other people's input on and it would be appropriate. common usage is for high-level specs, but RFC still means RFC.

          • XML is a tool. (Score:3, Interesting)

            by hta ( 7593 )
            XML is a standard from the World Wide Web Consortium.
            Some RFCs are standards published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Some are not.
            Most of the standards document protocols of some sort. Some document tools used to describe protocols, and some of these are languages (ABNF, RPSL).
            Some RFCs document protocols that use XML to represent their syntax.
            Some of these RFCs are IETF standards.

            • Re:XML is a tool. (Score:5, Informative)

              by JamesOfTheDesert ( 188356 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @11:30PM (#9394662) Journal
              XML is a standard from the World Wide Web Consortium.

              Well, not really; XML is a recommendation from the W3C. The W3C is not a standards body. It is a vendor consortia.

              The W3C puts out specs that it expects vendors and developers to agree on and work with. If all goes well after some period of time then it may be worth moving the spec onto a standards body, such as ISO.

              Sadly, the word "standard" has become a substitute for "specification. Hence you hear about the Java(tm) "standard", the Atom "standard", and so on. Everytime somebody puts something down on paper they say, "Hey, we have this new standard." But it makes for great marketing to say, 'Oh, we're all standards-based.'

          • Re:You'd think... (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Mattcelt ( 454751 )
            I am not sure from whence your thoughts arose
            that RFCs would really exclude these
            Since RFCs can e'en apply to prose
            and truly be to anything with ease.
            That XML does not have one its own
            shows limitations not with this process
            Rather with those who thought to bring it forth
            Without an RFC, XML's a mess.
            And so to prove that RFCs stand tall
            Do you think this [faqs.org] counts as a protocol?
    • According to Tim Bray [tbray.org], the IETF has approved the formation of a group to standardise Atom at IETF. Tim says:
      There is no meaningful technical conflict between RSS and Atom. RSS is widely deployed and is not going away any time soon.
      so chances are this will be a convergence activity and not the war that news.com wants to write about.

  • FYI (because I didn't know this) (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:21PM (#9392340)
    RSS and Atom files provide news updates from a website in a simple form for your computer. You read these files in a program called an aggregator, which collects news from various websites and provides it to you in a simple form.
    • I don't understand why people want this. It can be out of date for an often-updated site like Slashdot or Fark, and to do anything (i.e., post or read comments) you have to go to the website anyway. I've tried RSS and it's absolutely useless.

      • Re:FYI (because I didn't know this) (Score:4, Insightful)

        by secolactico ( 519805 ) * on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:43PM (#9392529) Journal
        No it isn't. Not for me at least. It can be somewhat behind the latests posts, but since I'm not the kind that constantly hits refresh on Slashdot nor Fark, it doesn't matter to me.

        The way I use it, I have several sources (a couple of interesting blogs, a book review site, Slashdot, Fark, etc), it then refreshes every 30 minutes, and I can keep track on new posts from a single location. If I see an interesting article on one of the sites, then I go to the actual web page.

        Plus, my RSS reader is inobtrusive enough that noone can see I'm actually monitoring goof-off sites.

      • Re:FYI (because I didn't know this) (Score:5, Interesting)

        by HappyDrgn ( 142428 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:51PM (#9392593) Homepage
        It is often useful for sites which would like to carry news but the primary objective of the site is not news. RSS is a standard way to receive the news from multiple sources and parse it using a standard class or function. An example would be an ISP members section. You could provide news stories or even securityfocus.com announcements updated automatically without any additional labor. This is a benefit to both parties in that it adds value to your site while at the same time drives traffic to the news supplier (hopefully for them increasing ad revenue).

      • Re:FYI (because I didn't know this) (Score:5, Insightful)

        by dindi ( 78034 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:51PM (#9392595)
        Out of sync ? LATE ?

        People! Your aggregator might be out of sync, not the website RSS feed.
        If you update the sources every 5 minutes it is still better than reloading the whole site every 5 minutes (and some sites have update time policies eg every 10 mins)
        The feed most likely comes from the same db and as so it is not outdated.

        Useful ? well if you use a PDA over a GPRS link, it is really cool to have just headlines that consume a few bytes, instead of loading 20 websites with all the ads and gfx (could be megabytes)

        I think it is a cool thing, and even if you do not have a decent aggregator you can sed and grep and awk it to assemble a desired format ...

        just my 1cent opinion :)
      • When I was using Linux, I used KNewsTicker to stay up-to-date on Slashdot headlines. Now with OS X, I have to keep reloading the webpage like everybody else : (

        If anybody knows of a KNewsTicker-like program that can run without KDE, TELL ME!!!
      • It depends on how often you update it.

        I rather like Bloglines. It polls all the sites itself (and its bot is polite and tells you how many subscribers the feed has, so you don't have to worry about losing that information because of a proxy), so I don't have to go round-robin all the time. (It's not really different from setting up an automatic poller, other than I don't feel guily about pinging a site all the time just for one little feed.)

        It's not all that useful for Slashdot, being that I generally w

      • my newsfeed site saves me a ton of time every day

        check it out here: http://fooey.net/Newsfeeds.cfm [fooey.net]

        just one big page with all the news sites I like where i can see at a glance anything new that pops up

        i'm currently working on making it more database driven so I can search for those rouge articles you can never seem to find

        something like this one that i'm working on for fark: http://fooey.net/Farkives/ [fooey.net]

    • I recently got interested in this and started using rss2email [aaronsw.com] in a cron job. I get info from slashdot, the washington post, thinkgeek, and a few others I can't recall.

  • and in other news.... (Score:5, Informative)

    by hta ( 7593 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:22PM (#9392343) Homepage Journal
    the IETF just approved a new WG whose charter says:

    The working group will use experience gained with RSS (variably used as a name by itself and as an acronym for "RDF Site Summary", "Rich Site Summary", or "Really Simple Syndication") as the basis for a standards-track document specifying the model, syntax, and feed format.

    The name of the group is ATOMPUB, so you see where the rest of the experience being considered comes from.

  • Atom? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tragek ( 772040 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:22PM (#9392346) Journal
    Why did atom even come into existance? Was not RSS already established, or is there some kind of deficiancy in RSS that i'm missing here?

    • Re:Atom? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:28PM (#9392408)
      Why did atom even come into existance? Was not RSS already established, or is there some kind of deficiancy in RSS that i'm missing here?

      If we didn't keep reinventing the wheel then society would be plagued with unemployed wheel inventors with nothing to keep them busy. It would be a nightmare.

    • Re:Atom? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Dun Malg ( 230075 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:35PM (#9392469) Homepage
      Why did atom even come into existance? Was not RSS already established, or is there some kind of deficiancy in RSS that i'm missing here?

      I think the deficiency with RSS was lack of a consistent implementation. There were too many minor variations within the assorted RSS instances to guarantee compatibility from one to another. Atom had the advantage of being self-consistency.

    • Re:Atom? (Score:5, Funny)

      by isorox ( 205688 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:50PM (#9392581) Homepage Journal
      Why did atom even come into existance?

      A Proton and an Electron met up and decided to marry

    • Re:Atom? (Score:5, Informative)

      by costas ( 38724 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:55PM (#9392620) Homepage
      As far as I understand things, besides personality issues, the Atom folks were looking for more i18n and for a more-specific standard --there are tags in RSS who are being (mis)used differently by different content-producers exactly because the spec was not very clear from the beginning.

      As an RSS producer/consumer myself [memigo.com], the one thing I've always hated about RSS was the encoding of the description tag: some feeds escape any HTML included in description, some make the whole tag a big CDATA entity, and in any case there is no information provided as to the encoding of the included HTML. One of the side effects has been that if you are parsing RSS, you have to assume that description includes HTML. So, if you happen to have > or < or any other HTML-looking entities within description, your content will be mangled by the RSS-consuming code.
      • Shouldn't those be escaped to < and for any XML conversion anyway? I'm not just being glib, I've written my own XML-RPC implementations... so if the description does include an unescaped , wouldn't that be Wrong?
        • Yes, you're right, you have to escape them. But in RSS's description tag, because of tradition (not because of the spec) you have to assume that the content is always escaped HTML. So, if you don't have HTML in your description tag and you put in say the string " big &lt;small", then an otherwise fine RSS parser will assume that the latter part of that string is really a not properly enclosed <small> tag, and may or may not chop off the rest of the entity. Ugly.

      • Re:Atom? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jacobito ( 95519 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @07:09PM (#9393191) Homepage

        I wish the parent post could be modded up even further. The problem with RSS is that the spec is sufficiently vague that it is practically guaranteed that any RSS parser you write will eventually encounter an RSS feed that is valid according to the spec but cannot be correctly parsed. It's a mess.

        If you really want to open your eyes, download the Universal Feed Parser [diveintomark.org] and take a look at the enormous number of test cases that the author uses.

        It's hoped that Atom will benefit from the tremendous amount of accumulated experience and knowledged gained by watching the failures of RSS. The analogy might be that Atom is to RSS as XHTML 2.0 is to HTML, with the exception that we hope it's not too late to adopt Atom (as is surely the case with XHTML 2.0).

        • Re:Atom? (Score:3, Informative)

          by Isofarro ( 193427 )

          The problem with RSS is that the spec is sufficiently vague that it is practically guaranteed that any RSS parser you write will eventually encounter an RSS feed that is valid according to the spec but cannot be correctly parsed.

          That's already happened [intertwingly.net]. When Reuters launched its RSS feeds two weeks ago it was valid as per the RSS2.0 specification, but every news aggregator failed to display the stock-ticker names within the feed. Silent data loss [scripting.com].

          What is unfortunate, from an RSS perspective, is that

    • RSS is read-only, and Atom, as well as being an easier format to grok, can be used to publish entries, as well as retrieving them.
    • "Why did atom even come into existance? Was not RSS already established, or is there some kind of deficiancy in RSS that i'm missing here?"

      Why did RSS even come into existance? Was not ICE already established? (NB: ICE was in production in 1998, before which it was submitted to the W3C, etc. See the ICE web site [icestandard.org] for more history.

      People create new protocols that duplicate existing ones all the time. Unfortunately. It often comes down to politics and personalities.

      That being said, it's possible to overc

  • RSS - Please Converge On a Standard! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fastdecade ( 179638 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:27PM (#9392401)
    Will RSS and Atom finally converge?

    HOPE SO! Blogging has moved so fast that the tangled web of RSS protocols [ourpla.net] is confusing to RSS publishers and users alike.

    Far more important than their individual features would be a single standard, so that publi7shing tools could stop bothering about compatibility issues and get on with features people care about.

    Only Google has the power to create an RSS standard. Google, you're our only hope!
    • Additionally, I have not been impressed by RSS in general. It seems like most of the feeds are small blurbs with links to more content on the website.

      I've tried several of the clients and have tried to add as many news feeds as I could, but it all seems the same. Little content and just a link to a webpage. I could just go visit the webpage and see the same summaries.

      I was expecting something like an AP newswire, with interesting stories from all over the world that I could not find on a standard websi

      • Re:RSS - Please Converge On a Standard! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        That's what an aggregator is for. The idea is that you subscribe to a bunch of feeds, and you are notified when a new story is published. It simply lets you handle more information sources in less time.
      • There are some really nice/creative feeds out there that push the limits of RSS.

        Amazon for example has a TON of feeds showing what the current top sellers are in virtually every category. Those at the top of the list are the top sellers and so forth.

        That's one interesting way of imbedding information into a channel without actually adding textual information. I could forsee a script that takes that (easily parsable) data and turns it into a regularly updated graph. The same thing could be done with scr
    • Even if RSS and Atom converged, some people would continue using the old RSS 2.0, so you'd still have two standards (RSS 2.0 and the converged format). You'd be no better off.

      Also, given the different value systems of the RSS and Atom advocates, attempts at convergence are just likely to lead to deadlock.
    • RSS isn't too bad if you ignore all the Dublin Core additions.

    • Question: what do you get if you merge Atom and RSS?
      Answer: Atom.

      So it sounds good to me. :-)

  • Are you insane?!? (Score:5, Funny)

    by burgburgburg ( 574866 ) <splisken06NO@SPAMemail.com> on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:28PM (#9392410)
    Will RSS and Atom finally converge?

    If they do, then the [trekmode]Universe will come to an end![/trekmode]

    Oh, wait, that's matter and antimatter. Never mind. False alarm. Boy, I'm embarrassed now.

  • I'm more interested in Slashdot's RSS (Score:4, Interesting)

    by James A. S. Joyce ( 784805 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:29PM (#9392418) Homepage
    Yeah, yeah, the story's about Google, but Slashdot's probably the second most popular website with an RSS feed, and it, um, sucks, to put it bluntly. It's updated infrequently, you're banned if you accidentally load it every 40 minutes instead of every hour, there's only one flat feed for all sections, and so on and so forth. Taco, can you fix your RSS? Setting a good example and all...heck, it's because of Slashdot that we have an additional RSS module!

    • Re:I'm more interested in Slashdot's RSS (Score:5, Interesting)

      by costas ( 38724 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @06:09PM (#9392742) Homepage
      Because I always hated /.'s RSS myself, I ended up building this newsbot [memigo.com] to get my news fix: memigo will scrape HTML and read RSS and it will rank articles based on user ratings and the "reputation" that each source builds up over time. More interestingly (and on-topic), memigo will produce custom RSS feeds with just your recommended news articles --you basically get a special URL to get custom RSS from, or even custom PDA-optimized feeds if you want.
    • Washington Post? London Telegraph?

      The world's major papers are shifting to RSS in a big way.

      They've got audiences geekdom only dreams of.

      People who want a free wire service will be disapointed.

      but Moreover provides something pretty close.

      And if google news went RSS (or stopped barring others from scraping it) then yes it'd be even closer.

      but RSS/Atom is very handy if you've got a lot of sites to monitor.

  • RSS & Atom (Score:5, Informative)

    by JaF893 ( 745419 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:30PM (#9392424) Journal
    Hopefully google will adopt RSS rather than Atom. I don't know why but I've always preferred RSS. Incase you are thinking WTF here are some links courtesy of Wikipedia:
    RSS [wikipedia.org]
    Atom [wikipedia.org] Note: These pages are a bit thin on detail but contain some useful links if you want to find out more

  • The weight of Google (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Infonaut ( 96956 ) <infonaut@gmail.com> on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:30PM (#9392433) Homepage Journal
    It will be interesting to see how this plays out, but it would be nice if the clout of the company that dominates search could be used to help a standard rather than hinder it.

    Microsoft, are you watching?

    • Google is switching from supporting one standard (under development), Atom to supporting two Atom and RSS. I suppose if you adhere to the belief that "more is better" then this is a good move. If you believe that corporations shouldn't take sides in standards wars then this is also a good move. But it certainly isn't a case of abandoning something proprietary for something standard as you are painting it.
      • "... it certainly isn't a case of abandoning something proprietary for something standard as you are painting it."

        I left myself open to that one. Actually my intention was to point out that although Google "acquired" Atom in a sense, and might simply try to bury RSS, Google may be actually trying to figure out which technology is best.

        It's not that either standard is proprietary, it's that Google seems to be coming at this not from the perspective of, "It's gonna be Atom, and dammit, we're gonna ram it

  • Who uses Atom?? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:32PM (#9392440)
    I do some website development and have actually gone out and looked for decent Atom newsfeeds just out of curiosity. I have never found any (yes I know how to use google, teoma, dogpile, etc...) worthwhile newsfeeds using this standard. Perhaps some of the readers have seen such feeds. I would be very interested to hear of good technical feeds using the Atom standard. Also why Atom? I might be ignorant of what makes Atom a good alternative, RSS seems to work well, but I am new to the scene maybe someone could enlighten me as to why we need the Atom standard.

    AC

  • methinks... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by abscondment ( 672321 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:35PM (#9392471) Homepage

    This is probably a good choice. I mean, the W3C [w3.org] uses RSS to syndicate their page (see the bottom).
    As the state, RSS is based on RDF [w3.org], which is an approved standard.

    Based on the coverage at ZDNet [com.com], it seems that Yahoo! also goes RSS...

    Why would the two merge when so many major players are leaning towards RSS already?

    • Re:methinks... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "RSS" as a standard does not exist.

      Your post is a good example. What Dave Winer calls "RSS" (0.9x, 2.0) is not based on RDF. That would be "RSS 1.0". Right now, there are three standards going forward: RSS 1.0 (RDF-based), RSS 2.0 (Winer), and Atom.

      Part of the problem is that Dave wields veto power in the RSS world, and he hasn't been responsive to others' needs. Like any good open project, his faults have prompted forks (two, in this case).
    • I'm not sure you understand. There are about four mutually incompatible standards all called "RSS". The one that the W3C uses is by most of the same people who have now moved on to Atom to avoid the war over the RSS acronym.

    • Re:methinks... (Score:5, Informative)

      by jacobito ( 95519 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @06:52PM (#9393087) Homepage
      To my knowledge, RSS 1.0 is based on RDF. The two other major versions of RSS, 0.91 and 2.0, are not. All told, there are at least 9 different versions of RSS [diveintomark.org], each slightly incompatible with the other:
      There are 9 versions of RSS, all of which are incompatible with various other versions. RSS 0.90 is incompatible with Netscape's RSS 0.91, Netscape's RSS 0.91 is incompatible with Userland's RSS 0.91, Netscape's RSS 0.91 is incompatible with RSS 1.0, Userland's RSS 0.91 is incompatible with RSS 0.92, RSS 0.92 is incompatible with RSS 0.93, RSS 0.93 is incompatible with RSS 0.94, RSS 0.94 is incompatible with RSS 2.0, and RSS 2.0 is incompatible with itself.
      (from the above link)

  • Headline is misleading. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sakusha ( 441986 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:36PM (#9392478)
    No, they're not "moving towards" an RSS standard. They're merely supporting RSS as well as Atom. Doesn't seem like they're moving towards anything, they're not moving away from Atom.

  • Dave Winer still controls RSS (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:38PM (#9392492)

    During the recent call for comments over changing the RSS 2.0 specification, Mark Pilgrim supplied a test case to show that it was a non-backwards-compatible change [diveintomark.org].

    While Dave Winer is supposed to not control the RSS specification, he managed to delete Mark Pilgrim's comments as he has control over the server the comment system runs on.

    Mark and Dave don't get on; that's no big secret. But Dave interfered with feedback because of his grudge against Mark. I don't think anybody should claim that RSS is not under Dave's control.

    • No one controls RSS (Score:5, Informative)

      by rcade ( 4482 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @06:10PM (#9392746) Homepage
      I'm a member of the RSS Advisory Board along with Dave Winer and several others. What do we have to do to convince people that it isn't controlled by Dave Winer or anyone else? Read the license for RSS 2.0 [harvard.edu]. The specification is released under a Creative Commons license and no ownership is claimed of the format embodied by the specification.

      • Re:No one controls RSS (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        What do we have to do to convince people that it isn't controlled by Dave Winer or anyone else?

        For a start-off, when you ask for feedback on a proposed change to the specification, let people participate, even if Dave doesn't like them. Don't let him hide important feedback because of personal grudges.

      • Re:No one controls RSS (Score:4, Insightful)

        by tomwhore ( 10233 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @06:22PM (#9392843) Homepage Journal
        Dave is historicaly a pain in the ass. FreeSoftware/OpenSource should be able to get around ego centric pains in the ass, so let it be with RSS.

        Bye Bye Dave

        -tomwsmf

      • Re:No one controls RSS (Score:5, Insightful)

        by pudge ( 3605 ) * <slashdotNO@SPAMpudge.net> on Thursday June 10, 2004 @06:28PM (#9392893) Homepage Journal
        What do we have to do to convince people that it isn't controlled by Dave Winer or anyone else?

        Stop lying by saying it is not?

        The specification is released under a Creative Commons license and no ownership is claimed of the format embodied by the specification.

        Yes, it is under a Creative Commons license. So what? perl is GPL'd, but no one would say p5p doesn't control it. Sure, there's some slight difference in the case of true ownership, but the real difference is that there is a recognized body that everyone looks to, and that body was created by Dave, and is controlled in no small measure by Dave.

        The fact is that anyone who tries to improve upon or modify RSS is met with Dave's wrath. And this is precisely why Atom exists. There can never be convergence because Dave is still involved, and -- as evidence by the fact that he has several times over several years said he would no longer be invovled, but still is -- he likely forever will be.

      • Re:No one controls RSS (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 10, 2004 @08:09PM (#9393603)
        Roger, here's what you have to do to convince people that RSS isn't controlled by Dave Winer:

        -- Document and disclose the process for choosing members of the advisory board. Who issues the invitations? Who decides who to invite to be a member? If a member quits, who decides who will fill the empty slot?

        -- Enlarge the board so that Dave has to convince more than one person in order to get his way.

        -- Get people on the board who are not perceived by the public, correctly or incorrectly, as being Dave's cronies. It would be especially useful to get someone with technical stature in the business who has not been involved in the controversy.

        -- Eventually, convince Dave to retire from the board. The "Charles Goldfarb" factor is real, and a lot of people will just not participate if it means interacting with Dave, however unfair or irrational that feeling may be.

        (Comments similar to this post have been deleted by Dave from his message board.)

      • CC licensing is an insulting red herring (Score:5, Insightful)

        by yoz ( 3735 ) on Friday June 11, 2004 @06:20AM (#9396225) Homepage
        As I've said elsewhere: The difference between a completed technical standard placed under the Creative Commons and a truly open one is the difference between being allowed to scribble over the President's name in the newspaper and being able to vote for his opponent in the first place.

        I could take the CC-licensed RSS spec and change it however I wanted, and it wouldn't help things one bit because it wouldn't be an accepted standard any further than my own hard drive. It would just be another incompatible spec calling itself RSS 2.0 that developers have to deal with.

  • I asked them (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @05:49PM (#9392571) Homepage Journal
    When google news first emerged I thought hey, I wish I could just get the headlines as links. Later after I discovered and starting heavily using RSS I e-mailed google and told them that. Then when googles blog came out I was suprised to see it was syndicated. But not with RSS, heck their blog was made with blogger. I expected more from great google. Maybe now they will actually give me my RSS world news headlines I've been waiting for. But hopefully they wont point to news sites that need registration :P
    • When google news first emerged I thought hey, I wish I could just get the headlines as links.

      So did I. So a friend & I wrote a scraper. And we enjoyed our headlines until he got the old "cease & desist" notice.

      I hope they don't figure out I'm scraping a bunch of Google Groups, too...

  • needs XHTML for its product first (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    hey Google, how about creating a website that is standards compliant, [w3.org] before worrying about RSS feeds and minor sundries, good to see the W3C reccomendations and all that hard work in creating standards in the web browser are not going to waste.

    why bother ? its not like it matters right ?

    • Re:needs XHTML for its product first (Score:4, Insightful)

      by mabhatter654 ( 561290 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @07:45PM (#9393467)
      actually that's a great idea. A 500 LB gorilla like google could really serve to keep all the big players honest! Google has nothing to loose by adopting web standards and everything to gain. MS key bargining chip is OS integration...If Google tries to play in that space they will loose. They need to ensure they create their own space to play in. Open and vocal endorcement of W3C standards as well as implementing them to the fullest is one way google can keep the playing field level. Their Primary market is internet searching...not web services...but keeping MS from fragmenting that market is a very important goal. Even MS is not big enough to deliberately break Google in IE... the uproar would be huge!
  • This is good. Petition Google to rank XHTML valid pages more highly than others too:

    http://www.petitiononline.com/googhtml/petition.ht ml [petitiononline.com]

  • ditch Atom (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    RSS is winning. It doesn't matter if Atom is technically superior, or if hating Dave Winer is fun.

    Atom is simply wasting space at this point. Sure, the RSS spec sucks. I can't even tell you exactly what an RSS feed is supposed to look like or what all the different versions are. And Dave Winer can't write a well-defined spec to save his life (apparently doesn't understand ISO8601 dates, or Unicode, or that XML defaults to UTF-8). (He views this as a feature, not a bug.)

    But in a few minutes I can write a p
  • There's already a service called Google Alert [googlealert.com] that offers dynamically updating Google Search results through RSS feeds...

    Pretty handy.

  • I swear I've been through all of them and they all had big issues.

    I'm curious about the best aggregators for all the OS's

  • RSS - A broader view (Score:4, Interesting)

    by manmanic ( 662850 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @06:47PM (#9393039)
    This discussion of Google using RSS for Blogger [blogger.com] is all well and good, but what about the broader question of integrating RSS into their mainstream search services? By comparison, Feedster [feedster.com] searches RSS, and provides its results in RSS. But to get an RSS feed for a Google search you need to use the 3rd party GoogleAlert [googlealert.com]. Not to mention that Google recently shut down [74d.com] a third party news-to-RSS service. Aren't the guys from the Googleplex supposed to have technological vision or something?

  • This is rich... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stienman ( 51024 ) <adavis&ubasics,com> on Thursday June 10, 2004 @07:13PM (#9393236) Homepage Journal
    The "RSS 2.0 format is by far the most widely used format. There was a time when it looked like things would coalesce, but then things started to fragment, largely due to Google," Winer said. "RSS deserves Google's respect, and it's not getting it."

    Ah yes. Let's translate the first sentence, "RSS 2.0 format is by far the most widely used format. There was a time when it looked like things would go my way, but then people started to use a competing syndication system, largely due to Google"

    The line about RSS deserving respect from anyone much less Google just cracks me up. Regardless of which is "better," Google made a business decision to focus on one. RSS deserves nothing from Google or anyone else. It's a specification for crying out loud.

    Keeping this in mind, let's now translate the second sentence, "I deserve Google's respect, and I'm not getting it."

    That sounds about right. If you are so tied to your creation that you cannot seperate yourself from it then you need take a step back, take a deep breath, and avoid making decisions for your baby until it, and you, have matured.

    -Adam

  • Has anyone noticed the irony (Score:5, Funny)

    by ShatteredDream ( 636520 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @09:10PM (#9393902) Homepage
    That if you add a h to David's last name that his name aptly matches his behavior?

  • What's in it for me? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by easyfrag ( 210329 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @09:32PM (#9394024)
    I am not a blogger but I have been a reader of weblogs for a while now, (I have used many aggregators and have settled on Bloglines [bloglines.com] a web-based aggregator that is awesome with a tabbing browser like Firefox.) I have been following the Atom/RSS dispute for a while but have never seen the answer to the following question: What does this syndication war mean to me as an end user?

    A few others in this thread have asked a similar question but the answer always seems to do with how its beneficial to the blogger or content provider. Now this is important of course but as a geek I have learned to be wary of such arguments, the first time I fell for it I ended up with blinking text in my browser. Maybe I'm too cynical but I'm comfortable being cautious and indeed a little skeptical of the latest and greatest technological innovations.

    That being said: What will Atom do for me, Joe Blogreader, that the defacto standard RSS does not? Feeds and aggregators have changed how I use the net, my bookmarks menu has shrunk significantly and I'm on fewer mailing lists. What does Atom have to offer ME that I should bug my content providers to offer Atom feeds in addition to or in place of RSS?

  • Godwin's Law finished this already (Score:3, Funny)

    by Kalak ( 260968 ) on Thursday June 10, 2004 @09:48PM (#9394108) Homepage Journal
    As Tim Bray [scripting.com] has pointed out, the RSS discussion has ended by rule of Godwin's Law. Dave was the first to bring up the Soup Nazi [scripting.com], and so he has therefore lost.

  • RSS is a hack (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SteveX ( 5640 ) * on Friday June 11, 2004 @09:29AM (#9396905) Homepage
    RSS is being used as a way to broadcast a notification that something has changed. You post a new article to a site, and all the people who have subscribed to your RSS feed get notified.

    But RSS is a polling mechanism.

    I'd much rather see something like the IRC protocol or NNTP used, where the publisher posts one message and it propagages through a network of servers to everyone interested. The way it is now, if a million people subscribe to your RSS feed, that's a million aggregators polling every 15 minutes. Ouch.

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