RSS Web-Feeds, The Next Big Thing? 360
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)
Speed Read? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think he's got it right (Score:1, Insightful)
SpeedFeed it is. RSS is dead! Long live SpeedFeed!
yes, certainly "Alas"...NOT (Score:3, Insightful)
How bad is it to have become accostumed to the monopole of a single software??? What's wrong with having to surfe & choose the application you prefer???
Re:Why does everyone hate capitalism? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is Libertarian Central, my friend. No communists here.
Once again, technological evolution will force good capitalists to improve their business models. Poor capitalists. Unfortunately, that is exactly the way it's supposed to work. Go back and read your Adam Smith, pal.
Re:forget speed feed... (Score:4, Insightful)
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:What's so great about RSS? (Score:3, Insightful)
Network Licensing (Score:1, Insightful)
When only well paid professors had access to the net, then you could be assured that all the writing on the net was either for ego massage, and or political gain...none of this horrible, horrible, HORRIBLE economic gain that the common press expects.
The same thing happened with reading and writing. When only a few people could read...why, it was a glorious technology. Then with that fraggin' printing press, and all of the lower class starting to read, it was horrible. Horrible I tell you. Look at the garbage and tripe that got written to please the unkept masses.
I can remember the glory days of the net. Well, actually, I didn't actually get on the net at the time. There was a troll at the university that guarded access to the net and would only let groups he thought politically fit to get connections. But I can remember reading about the net, and but bursting with a desire to gain access... but a Stalin wanna be was guarding the door and deemed the group I was with at the time unfit. BTW, was that you?
PS...don't worry, the revolution will come, and middle class will be the first group slaughtered.
Re:RSSSSS Feed (Score:1, Insightful)
Not much point me posting this, because the moderators who should see it, won't.
Re:God I hope so. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:um (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:God I hope so. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Are you kidding? Virtually every blog I've visited has had the ability to add a comment. Two very popular technologies (Trackback & Pingback) relating to blogs were invented specifically to notify somebody that somebody is writing about their article. The Atom API may well include the ability to add comments to a website directly from a feed reader.
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
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.)
PointCast (Score:3, Insightful)
Here we go, "push" technology all over again.
Except this time, it isn't the stock feeds, but purported "geek news" sites.
Yeah, that's gonna fly.
Taint RSS at your own peril (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:God I hope so. (Score:4, Insightful)
feed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Back in the days of yore, when dragons ate virgins for dinner, and there were still virgins about, a thing called usenet used to be referred to. Typically, knights of the Realm would mention a newsfeed, and it was known that if you were a "real" usenet site, your parent would *push* new data to your news server as it became available.
Now, those poor folk who had tiny disk drives, or who were on a slow connection had the option to *pull* data from their server instead of accepting a feed... but we laughed at them and called them names.
Nowadays, it seems that lots of people talk about RSS feeds, or XML feeds, when they're really talking about pulling data from a source, not being fed data.
So, when did a feed become a slurp?