| By Linux News Desk |
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| February 29, 2004 12:00 AM EST |
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22,632 |
"E-mail is crippled," starts the
article, "concussed by an irrepressible spam stream."
"Web surfing can be equally confounding," Bajak continues, "a wobbly wade through bursts of pop-ups and loudmouthed video ads."
This, he believes "may explain the excitement these days over a somewhat crude but nifty software tool that automatically delivers updated information to your computer directly from your favorite Web sites."
He is referring to RSS feeds.
"Enthusiasts see these Web feeds as sketching the outline of the next Net revolution," Bajak notes.
Hundreds of thousands of RSS feeds are now available, spurred - in Bajak's view - "by the popularity of Web logs, which account for their bulk." One site that has been sorting feeds since 2001, Syndicat8.com, added 7,326 feeds in January 2004, he records, adding that it already had some 53,000 information streams prior to that.
Bajak quotes Microsoft's Robert Scobie, himself a subscriber to no fewer than 1300 feeds: "If you're not reading it in RSS you're wasting your time."
Here's the best part of the article though, when Bajak mints some nice phrases:
RSS has been called the TiVo of the Web, the first "killer app" of the anticipated automation of social and commercial transactions online using the Web's second-generation XML (extensible markup language) standard.
Yahoo and Google recently embraced Web feeds, he says, "and Microsoft is expected to incorporate tools for managing them in its next-generation operating system, code-named Longhorn." He is concerned that it's not simple for the non-techie to configure RSS, mind you.
If they're obvious on a Web page, the feeds generally are offered as orange buttons that read "XML" or "RSS." There's no uniformity to feeds, though the best include a good headline and a succinct summary. You can choose to have feeds delivered to your desktop or gathered by a Web-based service.
Bajak notes one eccentricity:
Programmers who've developed rival versions of RSS since its 1999 invention - primarily by [Dave] Winer and folks at Netscape - can't agree on what RSS is supposed to stand for. Winer's preference is Really Simple Syndication (RDF Site Summary and Rich Site Summary are the other options).
One recent suggestion arose at Slashdot.org, which is that an RSS feed should be called a "Speed Feed."
The rationale? Simple, according to the Slashdot's chief editor, "Cmdr Taco," - a.k.a. Rob Malda - who suggested it:
"Cheesy rhyming will help the non techno elite remember it."
"This is a technology that needs to be more widely deployed," he noted.
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