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journalism talking hold.
the rss revolution
For people who want to roll their own news reports, nothing
may be more important for them to understand than a little
known technology that is beginning to transform the delivery of
Internet content. And they can thank the bloggers, in large part,
for its growing success.
Early in the development of blogging software, programmers
baked in a content-syndication format called RSS, which stands
for (among other things) Really Simple Syndication. This syndica-
tion capability allows readers of blogs and other kinds of sites to
have their computers and other devices automatically retrieve the
content they care about. It s spawning a content revolution that is
only now beginning to be understood and appreciated. It could
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the read-write web
well become the next mainstream method of distributing, col-
lecting, and receiving various kinds of information. If the Web is
a content warehouse, the blogging world is a conversation and
RSS may be the best way to follow the conversation.
Imagine your own Presidential Briefing with only the
topics you want, updated whenever you want, and with the
added ability to drill down for details. No need to go to your
browser and reload a bunch of sites. RSS does the heavy lifting.
So don t think of RSS as just another technology abbrevia-
tion. Think of it as a Rosetta Stone to tomorrow s informa-
tion or at least some of it, said Chris Pirillo, founder of
LockerGnome, a provider of tech-oriented email newsletters.59
RSS suddenly makes the Internet work the way it should.
Instead of you searching for everything, the Internet comes to
you on your terms.
RSS, or a technology like it, is baked into almost every
weblog software product. Create a blog, and you re creating
RSS. There is a critical mass of content just from bloggers. But
traditional news organizations and businesses are realizing its
value, too, and they re creating RSS feeds, as the files are
called, of their own material.
If you want to see the RSS feed of my (or any other) weblog
or other RSS-enabled web site, you have to subscribe yourself. I
can t force it on you. This is one reason why RSS is so impor-
tant: the user is in control.
The web site accompanying this book has links to a variety
of RSS-related software and how to use it. But let me offer an
example to demonstrate how simple it is to get it running. In my
own case, on a Macintosh computer, I downloaded and
installed NetNewsWire,60 a type of program known as a news-
reader or aggregator. NetNewsWire came with a large collec-
tion of RSS feeds to which I could subscribe with a couple of
mouse clicks. For several that weren t included with the
software, subscribing was trickier. I had to find each site s RSS
feed web address, copy it, and paste it into NetNewsWire s sub-
scription chooser.
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we the media
Like other newsreaders, NetNewsWire has three panes,
much like most email programs. In the lefthand pane is a list of
sites I follow. I click on one of those site names, and the pane at
the top right of the screen shows the headlines from that site. I
click on a headline, and in the bottom-right pane I see a sum-
mary of the article or the entire piece, depending on what the
owner of the site has decided to provide. If I want to see the
original page or article, I need only double-click on the site
name or headline.
Because newsreaders pull together various feeds into one
screenful of information, they are incredible time savers. I can
pull the headlines and brief descriptions of postings from dozens
of blogs and other sites into a single application on my Mac. I
don t need to go surfing all over the Web to keep an eye on
what all the people I m interested in are writing. It comes to me.
The formatting and structure of an RSS feed tends to be
bare bones, making RSS a great way to make material available
on non-PC platforms such as smart phones and handheld orga-
nizers, as well as providing a way for web sites to syndicate con-
tent from one another. For example, I have an RSS reader on
my Treo 600, a combination phone and personal organizer. It
scoops up a bare minimum of material from the RSS feeds just
the headlines and summaries and provides a great service.
The extensibility of RSS creates some drawbacks. Many
weblogs expose only headlines and summaries to newsreaders,
requiring the user to click through to the source (the original
web site) to read the full text. The irony here is that the news-
reader actually undoes the idiosyncratic feel of many weblogs by
stripping them of visual elements such as layout or logos, as well
as eliminating the context produced by blogrolls (blog authors
links to other weblogs) or the author s biographical informa-
tion (and any advertising). The same drawback, or benefit,
exists with text versions of email newsletters.
Newsreaders also assign equal weight to everything they
display. So the headlines and text from Joe s Weblog receive
roughly the same display treatment as material from, say, The
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the read-write web
New York Times. For some users, this will be entirely appro-
priate. But others will demand and vendors will surely pro-
vide more nuanced newsreading tools, with the ability to high-
light by topic, by writer, by metrics such as how many other
people subscribe to a particular blog (its popularity), or by other
parameters. The world is waiting for such creative approaches,
and RSS and related tools will make them possible. Nick Brad-
bury, who wrote the popular HomeSite HTML editor and site-
design tool, has taken the first steps in that direction with Feed-
Demon,61 a Windows RSS reader that creates a newspaper-like
view of RSS content; for better or worse, it controls display
details and takes layout flexibility away from the human reader.
As exciting as RSS has become in the personal weblog con-
text, its possibilities are much wider. Information from all kinds
of sources can and should be syndicated this way. The New
York Times makes some of its content available via RSS.
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