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RSS: Should It Be Re-named "Speed Feed"?

Might "cheesy rhyming" help the non techno elite remember it?

"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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SYS-CON's Linux News Desk gathers stories, analysis, and information from around the Linux world and synthesizes them into an easy to digest format for IT/IS managers and other business decision-makers.

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Most Recent Comments
Adipex 03/21/04 12:30:19 PM EST

it is cheesy, but it makes life so much easier for some of us

sarah 03/08/04 03:53:56 PM EST

i totally agree! rhyming, cheesy as it may be, makes things so much easier for the lowest common denominator (i.e. people like me ;). And maybe people don't have to know what RSS is if the aggregators do a good job of communicating.

I'm hoping that Jyte will be one of the ways that people can cut through the techno-rabblerousers and just start using RSS (and Atom) feeds in a helpful, organized way. We're offering the ability to pre-load a version of Jyte with your (or your favorite) RSS feeds and/or searches. Check out my blog: a href="http://www.cafemama.com/2004/mar/5_whyjyteisright.html">cafemama for more info.

jeremy lightstone 03/02/04 01:43:12 PM EST

I am pessimistic about RSS. Not about the technology, but mostly IT's explanation of its role and rewards. That article explained nothing (ie. how to implement, how to profit/pay cost, how to make consumers pay for service,etc).

RSS is only a IT innovation to distribute content.
But consumers are increasingly less willing to pay for content. RSS will not speed up your life, cause it too will be saddled with ADVERTISEMENTS or similar.
When consumers will not pay, Ads are necessary and useful (when relevant to user:). Even if consumers will pay, publisher want to make more money, so Ads quickly become involved.

I work with many content-producers, the IT world needs to start implementing a strategy to make the producer a good living, through simple and tested methods, not through more layer of complexity. Even just a basic living!! I love innovation, but the non-IT world laughs at us for not making profit and $$(remember $$ is sadly a fact of modern life, and is also a statistical comparison tool for success). LET US GET DOWN TO BUSINESS & MAKE $$ FOR EVERYONE, including ourselves, then we can take our profit AND GIVE BACK TO SOCIETY IN MANY WAYS.

STOP the incessant quest to be THE MOST innovative. Just like the OLD-MAN:FERRARI, INNOVATION is just geek-speak for PENIS envy and MACHISMO.

Anyways, i know i just had a rant, but some of my comments are true. I just want all of us and others to be successful.

NotSoSabat 02/29/04 07:23:14 PM EST

The power of DNS alternative names [slashdot.com]! :-)

sabat 02/29/04 06:17:40 PM EST

Glad to see the SpeedFeed name is getting deserved attention, but it's slashdot.org, not slashdot.com, and it wasn't a subscriber who made the suggestion: it was Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda, the chief editor.

Ric Johnson 02/29/04 04:15:15 PM EST

I registered the domain SpeedFeed.Org for anyone to use.
Since I just grabbed it, it will take a while to come up. To see how to use it, see the the domain I grabbed for the Atom Wiki at AtomWiki.Org

Sorry about the repost - There is no preview

Ric Johnson 02/29/04 04:06:15 PM EST

I registered the domain httP://SpeedFeed.Org for anyone to use.

Since I just grabbed it, it will take a while to come up. To see how to use it, see the the domain I grabbed for the Atom Wiki at Http://AtomWikki.Org

ashishK 02/29/04 02:06:17 PM EST

This site goes with Really Simple Syndication

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