June 29, 2004

Time for the Switch Campaign

Regarding the recent announcement that the Apple Safari browser in the next generation of MacOS X will include an RSS aggregator, Dave Winer notes:

Bryan Bell has notes from MacRumors about the RSS capabilities of Safari. Apparently you can search the contents of the feeds. This is something Steve Gillmor has been asking for, for ages. Feedster on the Desktop. Of course it can only search the feeds you're subscribed to.
Geez, what contemporary aggregator doesn't do this?!?

Oh, yeah. Radio. Duh.

Posted June 29, 2004 05:44 PM | Permalink

April 15, 2004

Why It Ain't Syndication

Jason Kottke writes about why we should probably stop calling it syndication. It being this whole RSS/Atom/newsreader/aggregator universe of tools and technologies.

I agree wholeheartedly, and have for a while. However, I suspect that the term syndication will stick. It's probably too entrenched to dislodge at this point.

The only things worse than the term "syndication" are acronyms and and technology names like "RSS" and "Atom." And the only thing worse than those is meaningless orange XML icon.

Posted April 15, 2004 07:16 AM | Permalink

January 28, 2004

New Year, New Design

No, you are not imagining things. There is a big pair of stone lips in the header. It doesn't have any significant meaning; it just looks cool.

You might have noticed some other changes -- like just about everything. I started the re-design during the week between Christmas and New Year's with the idea that it would launch on New Year's Day. Oh well. A little bout of insomnia gave me the time over the last few days to get it to a point where I can roll it out.

I had to learn some new CSS stuff and a touch of XSL for the new RSS feed. I don't pretend to be an expert in this stuff, so I'm sure someone much more skilled will recoil in horror at my stylesheets, but it was a fun exercise to learn some new stuff.

One of the cooler parts of the redesign is the new RSS feed. When you take a look at it in a web browser, you might not think it's an RSS feed, because it doesn't look like one -- i.e., it's not a page of unrendered XML, but an XSL-styled page with an explanation of RSS and how to use it. However, it is a valid RSS 2.0 feed.

Since I've written about the bad interface for RSS before, I'm glad to be able to demonstrate a different approach.
Kudos go to Dave Shea of Mezzoblue who described this approach in Plugging the RSS Usability Hole. I've totally cribbed from Dave's code, since I know squat about XSL. A shout out also goes to Brad Choate for a non-funky RSS 2.0 template for Movable Type

There's still some sprucing up of the style to take place and I might apply the same approach to the RSS 1.0 and the new Atom 0.3 feeds if I get a bit more comfortable with XSL. But it's better than raw XML.

Anyway, for the most part, I think I'm about 85% complete on the redesign.

I know that the comment pages (e.g. the pop-ups and the previews) are still styled wrong. I'll get to that in the next day or two.

The content column (this white column) looks a little hinky when the content is shorter than the sidebar on the left, which only happens in a few of those categories where there aren't many posts. Not sure what to do about that. CSS gurus? Any ideas?

Also, my primary browser is Mozilla Firebird. I've checked the site briefly in IE and noticed at least one error in the comment form on the individual entry archive pages. I'd love to hear more feedback from IE users on Windows and Mac and as well as Safari and Mozilla users on the Mac. (And I suppose Konquerer et al on Linux, but don't expect to be a priority!)

I'm sure I've forgotten or missed some other stuff, so pardon the incorrectly styled comment pages and tell me what you think. Suggestions, feedback, constructive criticism -- all welcome.

I'm going to bed now. Nothing like coding CSS to cure insomnia. Sheesh.

Posted January 28, 2004 01:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

December 15, 2003

BitTorrent & RSS

From an article, BitTorrent and RSS Create Disruptive Revolution, by Steve Gilmor of eWeek:

One such candidate is peer-to-peer, as resurrected in the form of Bram Cohen's BitTorrent. It's an elegant protocol for distributing files, one that takes advantage of "the unused upload capacity of your customers." BitTorrent breaks up files into shards that are uploaded around the network as the file is downloaded by multiple clients. The more popular a file, the more endpoints exist. You download a file with BitTorrent by simultaneously collecting shards, assembling them together locally as they arrive.

Map this to RSS feeds: the more popular the feed, the more nodes on the network serving pieces of the feed. That would allow rapid downloads by many users by distributing the data across multiple sites. It's a digital Robin Hood, redistributing the wealth from the server to a network of peers. BitTorrent does cryptographic hashing of all data, so feed owners can be confident the file reaches its target unchanged.

Link via Scripting News.

Posted December 15, 2003 04:49 PM | Permalink

December 14, 2003

Getting RSS Wrong Again

Alan Levine at CogDogBlog points out that VersionTracker now has RSS feeds, and that the orange-on-white XML icon, instead of pointing to the actual RSS file, directs the user to a separate web page explaining what syndication. Alan thinks this will make me happy.

Boy, he couldn't be more wrong. This appraoch is even worse than the status quo.

For the record, the less-than-perfect status quo is an interface for syndication and aggregation (the orange-on-white XML icon) that:

Why is improving this interface important? Good interfaces help good technologies grow. While I recognize that a good interface won't save a bad technology, and that many good technologies have overcome horrendous interfaces, that really doesn't excuse saddling a good technology like syndication/aggregation with a bad interface.

Crazily, in defense of the leaving the orange XML icon alone, Dave Winer said

How many people click on things they aren't interested in? I don't. Too busy. I might, if I knew nothing about XML, click once, after seeing them pop up in lots of familiar places, seeing something I don't get, click on the Back button and remember not to go there again.


The unfortunate fact is Dave is right about that -- those that are curious will click, and if they're confused they will go away and not come back again. In my book, going away and not coming back is a problem.

Contrary to Alan's graphic ("Oh dear! Just what does these things mean? Do I dare click them? I am scared!"), the concern isn't that people will be "frightened" to click on the XML icon. As a producer of content, I want an interface for syndication that encourages and educates my readers to get involved with syndication and aggregation and to use it effectively -- not an interface that encourages the uninitiated to never go there again!

The current interface is exclusive, it's for the people "in the know." It assumes that you already know what the icon and the acronym mean and what to do with marked-up text behind it. It communicates nothing to people unfamiliar with syndication and aggregation (never mind being familiary with XML). If your typical consumer learned to use it, they learned in spite of the interface, not because of it. They learned because someone else had to teach them to overcome the counter-intuitiveness of the interface.

Now you're asking "So why are you against VersionTracker using the icon to link to explanatory text?" Simple: because it breaks the interface for those in the know. Someone who right-clicks on VersionTracker's orange XML icon and pastes that URL into their aggregator won't get subscribed to the feed. My goal is to encourage a new syndication feed subscription interface that is more communicative and more effective for readers who haven't been educated on the purpose of the orange-on-white XML icon . . . while not breaking the legacy functionality for those already in the know.

Posted December 14, 2003 03:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

December 10, 2003

The Syndication Is The Thing

Doc Searls is is on the right track:

My advocacy here is on behalf of syndication. I don't want to get into technical arguments, unless they're about language, which is where my own technical expertise lies.

Yesterday I said I thought Nova Spivak's "meta" talk was too vague, and that "syndication" was a better word to describe what RSS (which he likes) does.

While "syndication" may be more specific, however, today I'm not sure it's not misleading, unless we redefine it, which I think we can.

And the day before:

The act of syndication is a statement about the willingness of something to be known. I think that's the key. This "meta" business sounds to vague to me. When I explain RSS to people and use "metadata," their eyes glaze. When I use "syndication," their eyes shine, because they know exactly what I'm talking about. It's a real word.

In my experience, emphasis on the XML aspects of syndication induce the same kind of eye-glazing.

I'm not sure where Doc stands on the little orange icon, but shifting the focus onto the process of syndication and aggregation is the right direction. Focusing on the value of and removing technical impediments to that process (as opposed to making the process all about the data format that makes up its guts) is what will take the tech mainstream.

[Note: I orginally drafted this post on Monday morning, but didn't post it until this morning (Wednesday). When doing so, I forgot to change the Authored On date, so, chronologically, it got posted two days in the past. I've updated the timestamp to indicate the actual posting time, not the time of drafting.]

Posted December 10, 2003 08:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

December 09, 2003

RSS and its Discontents, Take Two

Dave Winer writes of another (perceived) attempt to grab control over RSS from someone who proposed an RSS re-naming contest. (Of course, it seems Winer frequently views anything that's not 100% approval of RSS 2.0 as it stands today as an attempt to wrest control away from [insert whomever actually "controls" RSS this week here].)

The comments on the post expanded to one of my favorite pet peeves: the lunacy of the orange XML icon.

I wrote about this last week, but read on for a copy of my rant in Winer's comment thread.

We don't really need a content to rename RSS. Another acryonym -- who cares? Technology is already acronym soup.

We *do* need a contest (or something) to get rid of the orange XML button that links to a bunch of gobbledy-gook. Yes, gobbledy-gook. *I* know it's XML, I know how to parse XML with my eyeballs . . . as does only about another 2% of the consumer population. (And I think that's a generous estimate.)

Dave Winer says:

"[I]f you let your mouse hover over the white-on-orange XML button, a tool tip will appear that says: 'Click here to see an XML representation of the content of this weblog.'

Now I assume something that you may not assume, that my reader is intelligent, and if they don't care about XML, or don't care to see the XML version of the weblog, they will either ignore the icon, or check it out, be puzzled, and get on with their life."

That's really condescending, IMHO.

There are bazillions of intelligent people who "don't care about XML" and "don't care to see the XML version of a weblog" and wouldn't understand -- and shouldn't have to understand -- the meaning of "Click here to see an XML representation of the content of this weblog." Lack of familiarity with XML or RSS isn't a sign of a lack of intelligence.

In fact, the entire success of weblogs is a result of software that abstracted the coding and tech-know-how necessary to frequently update a websites content and replaced that with an easy-to-use form-based interface . . . absolving intelligent non-technical people from having to waste precious time becoming an expert in something as mundane as HTML or FTP, removing the technical obstacles to using the Internet as a medium to communicate their passions.

The orange XML icon is simply bad user interface design. It doesn't communicate its purpose (except to the few already in the know). By assuming prior knowledge of acronyms and technology, it's an interface that excludes, instead of one that includes.

What would be better?

  1. A "Syndicate" or "Sydication" icon instead of an "XML" icon. "Subscribe" would be even better than "syndicate," although there would likely be confusion with email subscription. I've written about this before, of course.
  2. A pop up that says "Click here to subscribe to this site's content in your news aggregator" -- much more explanatory than "See an XML representation."
  3. Functionality that, when clicking on the "syndicate" icon, automatically launches the local machine's default aggregator and gives the user the option to subscribe.
  4. Absent a defined default aggregator, drives the user to a feed styled with XSL and CSS a la Mezzoblue's experiment: http://www.mezzoblue.com/rss/2.0/ (Yes, this page is a valid RSS 2.0 feed -- view the source if you don't believe it)

Number 1 and 2 are mind-numbingly easy. Number 4 is do-able with most of today's technology, and weblog vendors could make it easier.

Number 3 is probably problematic without further definition of the technology.

Posted December 9, 2003 06:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

November 26, 2003

RSS and its Discontents

Two recent articles raising red flags about a rosy RSS future:

Posted November 26, 2003 11:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

September 21, 2003

Naming RSS

Daniel Neely writes

Mixing one acronym with another, is just asking for puzzled looks by your readers. It's bad enough that a person still looking for the "Any" key needs to associate just one acronym with content. I think it's quite absurd to tell people to "click the XML button to get the RSS feed!" It leaves too many people scratching their heads and saying, "Huh?" Not a good thing if you're trying to reach a not-so-tech-savvy demographic. [link via Lockergnome's RSS Resource]

Absolutely! I think Neeley is identifying the problem appropriately, particularly the idiocy of misleading orange acronym button. Although, I don't think his solution (replace the acronym soup with the term "feed") is the best solution.

It's amazing that we have a perfectly good term -- subscribe -- that the mainstream understands to mean "receive regular updates to this publication," but we don't use it for content syndication via XML formats. Perhaps it has too many connotations related to subscribing to email ists?

"Subscribe" is a term that is much more accessible than "RSS" or "XML."

Posted September 21, 2003 09:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

September 17, 2003

Email v. RSS

After the Sobig virus debacle last month, cries about the death of email made their usual circuit. Some RSS advocatesstarted hammering away at nails with their saw, trying to figure out how their New Thing would replace the much maligned Old Thing.

Jon Udell wrote a piece, titled RSS to replace email? Nah., which prompted this response from Stephen Downes:

Jon Udell expresses doubt that RSS will replace email. His mail argument is that his current combination of spam filters work fine (though his email account is groaning under the volume). "It would be nuts," he writes, "to throw out the SMTP baby with the spam bathwater," though some tweaking (to verify that the sender is allow to send from that address) amy be needed. I don't agree, and here's why. In general, it seems to me, technologies that allow other people to put content into your space are unstable. On the other hand, technologies that allow you to get what you want from remote locations have been much more successful. SMTP is a put-type technology, while RSS is a get-type technology. It doesn't mean that RSS will replace email. But something will.

While Stephen is more or less correct about the put/get difference, I can't agree with his estimation of their comparitive value.

As opposed to the put/get dichotomy, I prefer to think of it as the difference between sender-initiated communication and recipient-initiated communication.

What Stephen calls "put-type technologies" are successful and useful because they allow the sender/caller to initiate communication. For example, IM and phones are put-type communication mediums, although synchronous forms, as opposed to the asynchronous put-type communications of email and the traditional letter. Sender-initiated communication is valuable because it generates a much higher likelihood of response than a medium where the individual who wants to get information out has to wait for his or her recipient has to request the communication because it eliminates the discovery component of recipient-initiated communication. E.g. if I want to subscribe to your RSS feed, I have to know where to find that feed first. If I want to check out a book from the library, I have to be able to find the book in the stacks (and find the library!)

Of course, the risk associated with sender-initiated communication is that sometimes senders we don't want to communicate with will initiate communication with us -- phone solicitations, email spam, etc. However, people accept this risk because the inconvenience of filtering out the unsolicited communication is less than the inconvenience of the discovery component of recipient-initiated communication. When I need to share a bit of important business information with a colleague, I want the additional security of putting it in their inbox instead of waiting for them to come to me. When my loved one is in the hospital, I want my phone to ring -- I don't want to wait five hours or five days to check to see if I'm needed.

Jon Udell's more recent follow up column on the subject, E-mail's special power points out another value of email that I hadn't considered, it's instantaneous group-forming capabilities:

Every interpersonal e-mail message creates, or sustains, or alters the membership of a group. It happens so naturally that we don't even think about it. When you're writing a message to Sally, you cc: Joe and Beth. Joe adds Mark to the cc: list on his reply. You and Sally work for one department of your company, Joe for another, Beth is a customer, and Mark is an outside contractor. These subtle and spontaneous acts of group formation and adjustments of group membership are the source of e-mail's special power. Without any help from an administrator, we transcend the boundaries not only of time and space but also of organizational trust.

Will RSS replace email? I'm with Udell; not a chance. I don't think Stephen believes RSS (or whatever content syndication mechanism we wind up with)will replace email, but I suspect we agree that it will become an effective alternative for a narrow band of email functions, like newsletters.

However, I do believe our best geeks will escalate the cold war with spammers to provide better software code for filtering . . . and eventually the government will alos step in to attempt better legal code. I'm not saying it's easy, but I am saying that sender-initiated communication mechanisms, including email, will not be replaced by recipient-initiated get-type technology.

You heard it here first. ;)

Posted September 17, 2003 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Syndication and its discontents

Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger, expresses doubt that RSS will wind up as the mainstream vehicle for syndication of content. I agree, although, for better or worse, it's pretty much all that we have for now.

Posted September 17, 2003 08:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

August 26, 2003

RSS Question

I notice that whenever my aggregator (still SharpReader) grabs feeds from some blogs, the Date for each entry is represented as the time the feed was downloaded, while on other feeds the Date for each entry is represented as the time the entry was originally published (or perhaps last modified?....nope, checked my own feed, which falls into the latter category, and it's definitely time of publication).

What's causing this? It appears that almost all of the "Date = time the feed was grabbed" offenders (and it is offensive) are weblogs powered by Userland software, so I'm guessing this has something to do with RSS 2.0 (which is prefered by Userland) vs. RSS 1.0 (which is the default on Six Apart's software, Movable Type and TypePad)? Or maybe it's a finicky feature of SharpReader? Someone enlighten me.

Whatever the reason, the question remains: why in the world would I want the entry's time/date stamp to be the time of download? How useless!

Posted August 26, 2003 10:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

August 19, 2003

Can Your Mother Use RSS?

Pito's Weblog [link via Scripting News]:

I don't think that whether Necho, RSS 2.0 or what-not is easy to use for the end user matters a wit. If we do our jobs right they will never ever see or talk about any of those.

Pito goes on to describe several phases of technological development: evangelical, tipping point, and standardization. Good analysis.

Posted August 19, 2003 09:35 PM | Permalink

August 18, 2003

Types of Aggregators

Dave Winer on types of aggregators:

There are two schools of thought about aggregators. One says that they should work like a mail reader, the other that it should work like a weblog. The former shows you each feed as a separate thing, the latter shows all articles in reverse-chronologic order, grouping them by time. Imho we already have enough mail readers, wire up RSS to email and you're done. Who needs another piece of software to do what an already-existing category does so well. But the latter, which is the approach I used in Radio's aggregator, works incredibly well. People who are just using mail-reader style aggregators are really missing something. Articles that only write about mail reader aggregators are also missing something.
Dave's right about the broad schools of thought, but wrong about the value of what he calls the "weblog-style" aggregators.

The best aggregators allow the user the flexibility to read a feed individually, as part of a group of feeds (defined by the user), or the entire collection of feeds. Not to mention filtering, searching, etc. For many (and probably overwhelmingly most) people, "weblog-style" isn't very efficient for filtering through or scanning thousands of posts from hundreds of subscriptions. There's a reason most aggregators use an email-like approach: it's an interface that has proven effective at managing large amounts of information for billions of users.

There were many reasons I abandoned Radio, not the least of them being the utter un-usability of its aggregator component for managing information. Locking the user into that one mode of information presentation is one reason (among several) that Radio Userland is not one of the best aggregators.

Posted August 18, 2003 06:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Mainstreaming Syndication

Jim Howard (in Chris Pirillo's excellent Lockergnome's RSS Resource) writes about the obstacles posed to the mainstream by RSS:

We toss about terms like XML, RSS, Aggregator, Blog, and MovableType with ease, because they are the tools of our trade. We embrace them, we understand them. But for the AOL minded masses, these terms are too vague, too complicated, too boring. For these people, instant messages and email are their primary tools. Google is useful to them, because it's simple. Email is useful for them because it allows them to forward amusing things to their friends and family, and because it is nearly omnipresent. Everyone has an email address.
Jim is absolutely right. I've written about this several times in recent weeks [chronologically: 1, 2, 3, 4]

The vendors of blogs and aggregators are caught up in personality wars over syndication and aggregation specs and technology, and no one is focusing on making the interfaces for syndication and aggregation appealing to the mainstream.

The somewhat arbitrary threshold I hold in the back of my mind for when I'll know the vendors are concerned about mainstream acceptance of syndication/aggregation is when the orange XML box ceases to be the primary interface to syndication feeds. It would be difficult to think of a symbol that is more meaningless and off-putting to the non-technical user than a blaze orange acronym for a mark-up language. :-/

Posted August 18, 2003 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

August 11, 2003

The Search for an Aggregator Continues

SharpReader, which I enjoy using immensely, has started leaking memory like a sieve with release 0.9.2. It was already a memory hog, sucking up more than 60 megs of memory regularly, but with 0.9.2, it began sucking up every last bit of available memory. Sigh. I emailed Luke this morning, but in the meantime I have an unusable aggregator and miss my feeds. Rolling back to version 0.9.1.3 alleviated the problem leakage problem . . . but 50-75 megs of memory is still too much for an aggregator to use.

So I'm shopping around for a new aggregator for Windows. Someone at the MERLOT conference recommended Awasu, but it appears their freebie version doesn't include support for importing subscriptions from an OPML file, and I don't feel like paying just to find out whether it can handle the 150+ subscriptions better than SharpReader.

Recommendations?

UPDATE (5:00pm): I purged an enormous amount (thousands) of old posts from SharpReader and that brought it's memory footprint down to about 54 megs. Could it be that SharpReader is loading the entire feed for each subscription into memory?!? That would be crazy! Yet it appears that the amount of memory SharpReader consumes is somehow related to the number of posts in each feed. :-/

Posted August 11, 2003 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

August 07, 2003

More on the Human Readability Smokescreen

Jason Kottke has fallen prey to the siren's lure of the "human readability" argument:

"If hardcore developers of RSS readers and authoring tools are the only ones technically savvy enough to understand RSS files, the pool of potential memes is limited by the size and narrow focus (not to mention, for the most part, gender) of that group. But if the format is fairly human readable (more like HTML 3.2 markup than, say, Perl code), you're going to get more people from different backgrounds hacking away at it."
I posted a pretty extensive response on Jason's blog, which for my loyal readers (both of you), I have repeated here.

Let's define which humans we're really talking about when we say "human readable." Most humans don't want to read an RSS file, nor do they want to view HTML source. Only a very small subset of humans (which I will call "geeks" for lack of a better term) are concerned with the underlying formats.

You think the web took off fast because of "view source"? Bah! Think of what would have happened with web publishing in 1995 if there had been an effective way of publishing web sites without having to reverse engineer HTML from "view source" and hand-code your own pages. The web didn't succeed because of "view source"; the web succeeded in spite of "view source."

The reliance on people who would reverse engineer HTML source and the concurrent lack of effective personal publishing tools held back the web. Weblog tools revolutionize personal web publishing because they overcome the "view source barrier;" they allow your typical, non-geek human to publish to the web simply and effectively without ever having to view HTML source to do so. Why can't we expect the same sort of transparency from tools that produce and consume RSS feeds?

So when we speak of "human readable" HTML or RSS, we're actually talking about "geek readable" formats. And I'm really not concerned about geeks. Anyone who makes the effort to understand RSS certainly has the skills to understand, with a little more effort, RDF. I'm concerned about the users who want to be able to use the web effectively without having to open the hood.

I fear that the adherence to "human (aka geek) readable" as a threshold not to be bypassed puts us dangerously close to getting stuck in the same kind of human-hostile web development environment of 1995, where users who are already experts in carpentry or law or teaching or pastry-making are expected to "view source" to learn complex new skills to participate in web publishing.

Anil is right: the bright orange XML button is a hostile user interface. It implies that you already know what the acronym means and what to do with it; it communicates nothing to non-geek humans. If non-geeks learn to use it, they learned in spite of the interface, not because of it.

The world doesn't want "human readable" formats and orangle XML branding; the world just wants functionality -- "syndicate my content" and "aggregate these other people's content." They don't care about the formats, and they shouldn't! They should care about dance and medicine and geology and pastries and all the other human specialties, and about communicating all that interesting stuff with each other via the web.

Geeks and developers should care about getting the technology out of their way so they can do it.

(FYI, this exact same debate took place on my weblog last week, albeit with much less heavy-hitters involved.)

Posted August 7, 2003 06:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

August 04, 2003

Even more (RSS, Pie/[N]Echo/Atom, and simplicity vs. complexity)

More on simplicity vs. complexity in RSS in Battle of the blog, an article on C|net.

Posted August 4, 2003 02:14 PM | Permalink

More on the Irrelevance of RSS and HTML

Vis a vis the discussion taking place around this earlier post, here are comments from Robin Good on The Death Of The Webmaster: Why Weblogs Bring A True Revolution To Internet Publishing [link via Doc Searls]:

It has never been to no-one enjoyment to have to go through through lengthy, and not intuitive procedures to simply make some new text appear on a certain page of your site.
Robin goes on to list all the advantages of using content management technology to make the tag-level formatting irrelevant to content author . . . and, by doing so, bring about the demise of the traditional "webmaster" whose role was to take all the content provided by authors and massage it into something presentable via the web.

Provides good fodder for the previous discussion of why "human readability" of formats and expectations of hand-coding by typical consumers (not necessarily developers) should go the way of the dinosaurs and Commodores. Well worth a read.

Posted August 4, 2003 01:07 PM | Permalink

July 30, 2003

Why RSS is (or should be) as irrelevant as HTML

Stephen Downes has written a tutorial on How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer.

Here's a simpler tutorial:

1. Get a weblog tool that supports RSS.
2. Write.
3. Let the weblog tool do the RSS work.

I haven't commented on the RSS/Atom debate (or RSS/Echo or RSS/Pie or RSS/RSS), because the whole thing is sadly personality-laden. However, I have followed it. And one of the most nonsensical tidbits I've seen (and of course can't find a link for at this moment) is the argument that RSS is better because it's "human readable." In other words, someone can look at an RSS file and more or less interpret the XML.

News flash, folks: Humans don't want to read RSS files in their raw form. And they sure as hell don't want write RSS files by hand in Notepad. (Beer? Yeah, they do want that.)

Hats off to Stephen, because I know that there is a subset of humans (e.g. "geeks," a group yours truly is sometimes lumped into, as well) who do nutty things like open RSS feeds to deciper the XML or code the stuff by hand. (And then they have big arguments over it, because how your arch-nemesis forms his XML is a Really Important Thing™. )

I also understand that back in the day (e.g. the 90's) all us old-timers learned to hand-code HTML pages by viewing the source of other people's HTML pages. Great approach!

But you know what? Your Aunt Mabel might publish a weblog with Blogger or Radio, but she's not going to scour the source of HTML pages to figure out a way to hand-code it. Nor is she going to do that with her RSS.

I don't expect Stephen's intended audience was your Aunt Mabel, but to bring this back around to some kind of semi-coherent thought, Aunt Mabel is the reason "human readable" is as ridiculous as the 1980's notion that every high school student should take a semester of Computer Science where they learn to program in Basic on an Apple IIe or else "they won't be able to use computers."

The best standards or specifications -- and probably the best technologies, in general -- are invisible; they should strive to not need to make themselves known to users.

Users should never have to think about how RSS or Atom feeds are formed, or even the difference between RSS and Atom. They should click a "syndicate my content" button in their publishing tool and a "fetch content from this source" tool in their aggregator and it should work, whatever the common formats are. If Aunt Mabel even has to remotely think about reading or writing an RSS file in its raw XML form, then the software developers have failed miserably.

Posted July 30, 2003 05:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

July 18, 2003

Change in Ownership of RSS Specification

Dave Winer orchestrated a move in which the company he founded, Userland, has turned over ownership of the RSS specification to Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

What a tremendously smart move on Winer's part.

Update (5:50pm, same day): I've read one or two sites (sorry, didn't save the links, I'll try to find them later) that have suggested that this is some kind of death knell or hiccup (because the hiccups are basicall small death knells) for Echo/Necho/Atom/Pie/InsertNameHere People who think Echo/Atom/Etc. is a replacement for RSS just haven't gotten up to speed on the issue. It's syndication + archiving + publishing API all rolled into one; there's some overlap with RSS, but the move of RSS from Userland to Harvard really doesn't have any impact on the value of Echo/Atom/Whatchamacallit.

They really need to settle the name issue quickly, though. Sheesh. Note to self: if you ever launch a high profile technology project, name it first. Else everyone has a hassle trying to talk about it.

Posted July 18, 2003 03:50 PM | Permalink

July 01, 2003

Synchronizing RSS Subscriptions

Hmmm. Dave Winer is working on the problem that has plagued the news aggregator of my dreams: synchronizing subscription lists.

I don't see why this is such a challenging problem. I'm not a programmer, so maybe I don't get the complexities of it. But I am a fairly technical guy, and if I had the mad programming skills to solve this problem, I'd do it like this:

  1. Make the subscription list a severable data file (XML, OPML, WordStar for DOS, whatever).
  2. Reference the subscription file's location by configuring a URI in the aggregator options. If it's a local file, it's just a URI pointing to your local file system, but you could also put that data file on any old remote HTTP server, with or without authentication.
    1. Hosting the subscription file on an HTTP server gives me the capability to share my subscription list with others, just by pointing them to a URI.
    2. Or hell with my own subscription list -- maybe I just point my aggregator at someone else's! If the aggregator allows you to define by URI the location of the subscription file, I could just point to someone else's publicly available subscription list instead of my own.
    3. Even niftier: the aggregator could support pointing at multiple subscription files living on multiple HTTP servers (e.g. just configure multiple URIs). E.g. in addition to being a news aggregator, it becomes a subscription list aggregator.1 There would probably have to be some pre-processing before aggregation to weed out redundancies. The complexities of that could be a bit more challenging.

      1Ooh -- and then we could syndicate our subscription lists via RSS! Talk about recursive!

  3. Whenever I want to "subscribe" to a new feed, the aggregator updates the remote subscription file on the remote HTTP server.
  4. Whenever I want to "aggregate" my feeds, the aggregator pulls down the remote subscription file from the remote HTTP server.

Clear as mud.

UPDATE 3:57pm: Someone should make sure this idea of "online subscription lists" (and the technology to manage and process them) goes into the discussion of the emergingEcho (or Pie) project (whatever it's called now), if it hasn't already. For those who haven't been following the brouhaha, Echo is a project to build a next-generation specification that combines a syndication format and weblog publishing API.

Posted July 1, 2003 03:32 PM | Permalink

NewsMonster Was a Monster

Well, yesterday I uninstalled NewsMonster, the RSS aggregator that runs inside of Mozilla. Back to SharpReader.

Great concept, but the execution on NewsMonster left something to be desired. Managing folders/groups of feeds turned out to be a real pain in the ass (no drag and drop, no way to define your own order (just sort by name, number of messages, etc.). It only tracks read/unread status of entire feeds, not individual posts within a feed as SharpReader does. That's a nearly useless method of tracking.

NewsMonster did whack things to the panes in Mozilla. NewsMonster is its own left pane -- why isn't it just integrated with the existing sidebar in Mozilla? So now you have a NewMonster left pane and a sidebar -- there's goest the screen real estate. When operating NewsMonster in three pane mode, getting rid of the upper pane where the feed headers were displayed was counter-intuitive. Frankly, I never figured out how to do it other than opening a new, empty tab and closing the tab where the header pane lived.

Most important to the decision to jettison it, though, is that NewsMonster was an enormous resource hog. It appeared to double or sometimes even triple the amount or memory Mozilla used and when it was downloading feeds, the entire machine nearly crawled to a halt.

I'm still intrigued by their online profile option, but didn't find the base functionality worth paying to get the convenience of the subscription list synching.

Posted July 1, 2003 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

June 25, 2003

Still Dreaming of News Aggregators

Via Boing Boing, I discovered NewsMonster this morning.

NewsMonster is an RSS aggregator that is integrated into Mozilla. If you're not using Mozilla . . . well, you should be. It's way better than IE. (I've had to use IE this week for some browser-specific testing. First time I've touched it in months, and, man, I could just never go back to non-tabbed browsing again.)

Anyway, if, for some silly reason, you're not using Mozilla, NewsMonster won't be of any use to you.

NewsMonster is closer to the news aggregator of my dreams. Like SharpReader it allows me to group my feeds into folders . . . although, unlike SharpReader, it won't provide an aggregated folder view :-( NewsMonster imports OPML, so I could just pull in my SharpReader subscriptions though importing apparently doesn't automatically create the folder structure which sorta makes you wonder if they missed the point of OPML. This led me to discover NewsMonster's managing of folders is much more cumbersome than SharpReader, e.g. no drag and drop, but that's the price you pay for staying away from .NET. I'm willing to pay.

However, the integration with Mozilla rocks. And NewsMonster does a Blogdex-like analysis of my subscribed feeds to show me the most popular links among my subscriptions, which is immediately useful.

The killer feature, though, is only available in the NewsMonster Pro version ($29.95): an online profile manager that allows you to store your subscription feeds online and synchronize them among multiple installations.

Since I'm a multi-computer guy who works from two to three different boxes that live in different locations, this is key to the news aggregator of my dreams.

I'll play with NewsMonster for a while, and if I like it as an aggregator, I think the online profile feature will be worth $30 bucks to me. Much more valuable than, for example, paying $40 for Radio Userland's crappy aggregation and mediocre weblogging tools. Ugh.

Now if I could only get Mozblog to work. And has anybody made an MT plug-in to integrate the Mozilla WYSIWYG HTML editing widget in Movable Type?

Posted June 25, 2003 07:44 AM | Permalink

May 23, 2003

For the Basic-Computer-Literacy-Impaired

Microdoc Reviews: 2003/03/11:

"FM Radio Station brings into one application a News Aggregator, Publishing Tool and Browser. For the first time since beginning with Radio, I can safely leave a partially finished blog and go see a news item, or surf to a site in the browser without the fear of losing my partly completed log. This is one of the best feelings I have had since beginning to use FMRS."

Finally! A tool for the user who doesn't know how to open another friggin' browser window. Thank goodness you can now pay $39.95 to avoid learning how to use ALT-TAB!

Posted May 23, 2003 06:41 AM | Permalink

May 16, 2003

News Aggregator of My Dreams

I'm enjoying SharpReader as my aggregator. Sort of.

See, I'm a multi-computer guy. It informs everything about the way I compute. I dislike having my necessary information tied to one computer. (See all my rants about why I dislike the "desktop server" approach to weblog tools for more info.)

I'd like a news aggregator that gives me the option to publish/store my subscription list and appropriate metadata about the status (e.g. read/unread, etc.) of posts online. When I refresh the feeds, it grabs that subscription list from the online location, and uses it to refresh. That way if I add a feed while at work (on the aggregator on my office desktop), I don't also have to add it at home (on either or both of the two computers there).

And while you're at it, could you make my Mozilla bookmarks work exactly the same way? Oh, and why not just integrate the aggregator into Mozilla while we're at it? Thanks!

Posted May 16, 2003 03:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

April 24, 2003

The Way of the Aggregator

I'll third Sebastian's seconding of Oliver's comments on Dave Winer's theory on news aggregators. Dave said:

RSS readers that work like Usenet readers are a waste of time, imho. Aggregators should not organize news by where items came from, just present the news in reverse chronologic order.

My news feed hierarchy in SharpReaderIn reality, a news aggregator should do both. I don't want my RSS feeds all filtered into separate little folders, but like Oliver, I'm subscribed to a whopping number of feeds -- 77 to be exact! And I just started using a news aggregator last week! My only previous experience had been Radio; I'm now a big RSS convert thanks to SharpReader.

SharpReader allows me to collect them into categories, in a Windows Explorer style set of folders. I can click on a folder and read a reverse-chronological list of all the feeds in the sub-folders (or chronological or sort by title or by weblog & category). I can even click on the top-level folder and read all of the subscribed feeds in reverse chronological order, a la Radio Userland's only option for organizing feeds, or a variety of other orders. If I just want to see what, say, D'Arcy is up to, then I can peek at just that weblog's folder. Much more flexible!

Posted April 24, 2003 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

April 21, 2003

Edublogger.opml: Niftiest Link of the Day!

Will Richardson, over at Weblogg-ed (why two G's, man? ... oh, wait I get it, a play on "weblogged"?), posts an XML subscription list of the RSS feed addresses for everyone he's aggregating through SharpReader. Since I just started using SharpReader last week, this is bonus! Thanks, Will!

Note to self: export and post your own SharpReader subscription list to share.

Posted April 21, 2003 05:41 PM | Permalink

April 18, 2003

Heterogenous RSS Versions

So today I downloaded SharpReader, a .NET news aggregator. I've tried Radio Userland and didn't like it for too many reasons to go into in this post, as well as Amphetadesk. I really don't like a news aggregator that runs in the browser. I'll probably also test out Syndirella and NewzCrawler, for comparison.

One thing I noticed immediately is that in RSS 0.91 feeds, the posts all have a time/date stamp that is the time the aggregator downloaded the item. That's ridiculous. Is that a SharpReader problem, or is that part of the RSS 0.91 spec? RSS 1.0 posts actually have the time of the post as the time/date stamp, which is how it should be.

The nice part of SharpReader, which I don't believe Radio or Amphetadesk have, is the ability to group your feeds, and view them in an aggregate group view. That approaches the "personal newspaper" model, so I get a variety of people's posts mixed together. Default sort is reverse chronological, but I can also sort by source. Of course, RSS 0.91 feeds screw that all up, because you'll have a big chunk of those authors posts plopped in the middle, since they're all tagged with the download time, instead of the actual posting time. :-/

With that in mind, I'm publishing an RSS 1.0 feed for this weblog, in addition to the RSS 0.91 feed I had. I'd get rid of the 0.91 feed, except that some people may have already subscribed to it. I'd recommend the 1.0 feed.

Posted April 18, 2003 02:12 PM | Permalink

April 16, 2003

The Pain of Multiplicity Heterogeneity

First, a note: If you're just catching up on this conversation via the blurb in Online Learning Daily, you might want to start with George Siemens' post, then my response, then back and forth. I'm putting out one more attempt at clarity, then dropping out of this thread. :-)

George wants to point to complexity as the enemy of standards. Stephen Downes said "Complicated standards result in complicated and inflexible software, exactly what people don't want and don't choose." I agree with Stephen's point, and I want to make it clear that I don't think complexity should necessarily be the ultimate goal, in and of itself. However, neither do I think complexity is the enemy.

The "pain of multiplicity" I referred to comes about when we wind up with with either multiple, heterogenous standards or multiple, heterogenous versions of the same standard. The "pain of multiplicity" could also be expressed as the "pain of heterogeneity." Come to think of it, heterogeneity is really the term I should have used, instead of multiplicity.

In our field, we have an alphabet soup of standards (IMS, AICC, SCORM, ARIADNE, LTSC LOM, SIF, etc.) that only overlap somewhat, nevermind being interoperable. The goal should be to bring the work that has been done together, to homogenize that heterogenity. It seems to me that these standards bodies are making progress on bringing these standards together. I'd like to see that process reach its end before we scrap it. Is the way we're getting ot the end -- i.e., resolving a half-dozen different specifications -- the best route? Probably not. But it's where we are; I don't see going back to the starting point or introducing yet another new "simple" standard as a solution that moves us away from the heterogeneity.

I would hate to see the form of heterogeneity we have now (multiple standards) be replaced by a different form of heterogeneity (many multiple versions of the same standard). I think that situation can be caused by rapid release of different versions of a simple standard, as George appears to advocate. I think of the "Best Viewed With ___" buttons that arose in the mid-nineties browser wars, while Netscape and IE proliferated multiple browser versions, each with their own quirky takes on the simultaneously evolving HTML standard. Or the fiasco around the RSS 0.93/1.0/2.0 iterations last year that froze anyone want to do RSS development. This is why I argue that standards definition can't follow the open source software development credo of "release early, release often" and remain effective as a standard while doing so.

A simple standard? Sure, I'm all for that. I think we'll see if the recent work with RSS and RLOs will bear fruit, so maybe the proof is in the pudding (to mix my food metaphors). I think we all probably agree that complexity, in the sense of multiple, heterogenous standards, is problematic. However, I believe that complexity, in the sense of standard that obtains its flexibility through richness and depth, is preferable to flexibility obtained through rapid, iterative releases.

The latter has the potential to result in a situation where we have different software or tools that support different versions of the same standard. Choice is best provide when different software supports the same standard. That's when the end users win.

[Please note: this post wins the award for All-Time Most Instances of the Word "Heterogeneity." In accepting this award, I'd like to thank the academy for teaching me to use five-dollar words like "heterogeneity" and "serendipitous" and "masticate."]

Posted April 16, 2003 09:24 PM | Permalink

September 20, 2002

Syndicate This, Bub:

Serious Instructional Technology's David Carter-Tod called me out for not having an RSS feed to allow people to subscribe to this blog.

For the uninitiated, RSS is Really Simple Syndication, a spec that allows information to be represented in an XML format that can then be grabbed by software called news aggregators (or RSS readers). I've never been really enamored of news aggregators. I don't mind going to the source, instead of dragging the content from the source sans the format, design, and frequently the context that makes it valuable, so I can get one big ugly long list of acontextual content.

But hey -- if my loving audience demands RSS, who am I to deny them? :-) Blogger Pro has RSS built in, I believe, but I'm still a cheapskate making do with Good Ol' Blogger Classic. Without native RSS, I've turned to a niftly little service called RSSify to generate the requisite XML files in RSS 0.92 format. You can right-click on the XML icon over in the right column and copy the URL for my RSS feed. The downside of RSSify is that it probably doesn't generate a very pretty feed. I don't use a news aggregator, so I really don't know what it's going to generate, but the XML looks like it chops up the post in a really hinky way. What the hell. If you're not happy with it, you can send me 35 bucks and I'll upgrade to Blogger Pro. :-)

And speaking of RSS, there is an enourmous amount of nonsense going on around the spec now. I think Dave Winer of Scripting News is generally considered the progenitor of the spec (although many claim he was building off work by Netscape). Although Winer let RSS languish at, I think, version 0.93, he went ballistic when someone else picked it up and started to define RSS 1.0. Apparently he didn't like the fact that they were changing "his" spec. For someone who frequently waves the flag about community collaboration on open standards, he sure seems to have gotten pissy when people want to take the spec in a new direction. So while RSS 1.0 is being hammered out, Winer puts out RSS 2.0. Now the RSS 1.0 people are talking about renaming their's RSS 3.0. Sheesh. An RSS cold war. And I thought I had a lot of time on my hands.

Posted September 20, 2002 08:25 AM | Permalink

Content on this site is © 2000 - 2008 by the author and licensed under a Creative Commons License.