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.
Syndication & Aggregation
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:
- Make the subscription list a severable data file (XML, OPML, WordStar for DOS, whatever).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
- Whenever I want to “subscribe” to a new feed, the aggregator updates the remote subscription file on the remote HTTP server.
- 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.
Syndication & Aggregation
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.
Syndication & Aggregation
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?
Syndication & Aggregation
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!
Syndication & Aggregation, Weblogs
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!
Syndication & Aggregation
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.
In 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!
Syndication & Aggregation
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.
Education, Syndication & Aggregation, Weblogs
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.
Standards, Syndication & Aggregation
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.
Read more…
Education, Standards, Syndication & Aggregation