Slashdot Mirror
RSS Web-Feeds, The Next Big Thing?
mi writes "Yahoo! carries an Associated Press editorial
about RSS-based news feeds, and how they are pushing the spam-ridden e-mail and advertising-ridden web-pages aside and consolidate information from multiple sites. Slashdot itself is mentioned by the author as one of his sources." We've been exporting our headlines practically since the beginning. (note that RSS link in the footer). I still think the problem with RSS is the name. It sounds stupid. Let's all call it 'Speed Feed'. Cheesy rhyming will help the non techno elite remember it, and this is a technology that needs to be more widely deployed. (It's also worth noting that Slashdot's RSS feed will have more article contents for subscribers in a few weeks)
Evolution uses them, you can link it into your own web-page. It makes surfing more efficient, and more secure. Formerly CRAYON was, IMHO a great site for quick-surfing only the news you wanted to read, but all the news you wanted to read in one place. Sadly, a lot of (general news) sites have pulled old RSS feeds, or made them far to difficult to find.
Kudos Slashdot. Hiss to CNN.
how about quick fix? fastpass? extremely expedient content delivery system?
That last one may not be quite as catchy...
Any recomendations for a good RSS reader for Win32
It /must/ be the name that is harming adoption, that HTML thing never really caught on either did it?. Actually speed-read sounds kind of catchy and gives the uninitiated a good idea of what it does so ignore me...
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
If I were able to read the news ten times more quickly, I'd just have to get back to work ten times faster!
Consider what you use the internet for, and how it's changed:
The more-successful protocols - those that actually deliver information are those left commercially-free. FTP is pretty basic, but you get what you want and nothing else. Usenet news has flamewars galore, but the limitations on what can be posted in non-binary groups actually seem to work well.
When I first started using the web, I set up a website for my image-processing postgrad group. We emailed CERN to let them know there was another website on the net
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Yess...
we wantssss it...
RSSSS feed...our precioussss....
1) RDF Site Syndication; or
2) Really Simple Syndication????
Which one is correct?
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Slashdot's RSS feed is really useful. Apart from the fact that:
All in all, this makes it pretty damn useless. Way to go, dipshit.
It is built into Opera
Speedfeed...though it does bring to mind when my brother was in basic training...they only get a few minutes for meals, and work up a heckuva appetite...He got a weekend off and I went to visit. We went to lunch, he ordered a big meal and, just out of habit, polished it off in five minutes flat. Just inhaled the sucker. Midway through, he said "hey just so you know, I'm choking right now. Only way to eat this fast is to swallow bites whole."
If you're looking for a stable, well performing reader that is host based, meaning you don't have to move your config files and pointers, check out Bloglines.
Developed by the same person who started Egroups, Bloglines offers the ability to manage your feeds through a simple interface available anywhere.
The power also includes:
1) Disposable email addresses.
2) Sharing of your feeds.
3) Exporting of feeds.
4) Routing email to your account.
A great, free service.
...does anyone know of a docklet for GNOME2 that shows the current headlines from a site (slashdot.org)? I remember something like that in GNOME1..
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
How bad is it to have become accostumed to the monopole of a single software??? What's wrong with having to surfe & choose the application you prefer???
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
I use it for news sites, meaning I get the news as soon as it is updated, and most news sites (at least not in Norway) doesn't require any form of log-on etc, so no cookies.
Also, some rss readers have browser capabilities, enabling them to store cookies iirc
RSS is just an XML flavour which most people serve using HTTP, so there is no reason why you can't use cookies alongside an RSS feed.
XML syndication is great but there are several drawbacks:
The standards wars: RSS 0.9 vs RSS 1.0 vs RSS 2.0 vs Atom. As a provider if I want to reach as many people as possible I will have to provide 4 different formats! (RSS 2.0 should be readable by RSS 0.9 readers but you never know).
The bad client implementations: repeat after me: 304 Modified. If you consume XML/RSS, make sure your client supports 304 Modified responses, and provides Last Modified and ETags. Otherwise, you're wasting my bandwidth, and I'll have to ban your customers (which I don't want to do!).
RSS is less two-way than HTML: a lot (not all definitely) of the RSS clients make it hard to interact with the authoring site, much more so than plain HTML and a browser. Fortunately, this is changing.
IMHO, RSS is a good first attempt at a truly automated, interactive Web experience. But the killer apps will have to wait for better technology and infrastructure...
Slashdot offers an RSS feed, but there's still no feed containing all the stories. Anything that's not front-paged isn't available through the RSS feed. That means about 1/4 of Slashdot's content is unavailable without visiting the site and either browsing sections or turning on all stories in user preferences.
This is Libertarian Central, my friend. No communists here.
Once again, technological evolution will force good capitalists to improve their business models. Poor capitalists. Unfortunately, that is exactly the way it's supposed to work. Go back and read your Adam Smith, pal.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
I actually don't get what's so revolutionary about RSS. I continually see references to it as an example of "PUSH" technology. To me that means the server initiates the transfer of data to the client. I've never seen an example of RSS working this way. At best, I hit a web page, which has some RSS scripting which then goes and hits dozens of other pages with RSS feeds. This could all be done on the client, and in fact, I may not only be grabbing Slashdot headlines by visiting another server, but I may also be grabbing them at the same time by opening up Evolution, or any of dozens of other programs. I can't remember the last time I looked at Slashdot headlines using Evolution, but its right there on my summary page just the same.
It basically serves up headlines. It's pretty useless without conventional HTML/CSS behind it.
My concern is that once it REALLY takes off there are going to be millions of people running RSS harvesting programs 24 hours a day. That means servers having to respond to all these behind the scenes inquiries for data that is almost NEVER going to be looked at.
This sounds like something that could be done a lot more efficiently by the likes of Google. They scan everything anyway, no reason they can't summarize much of it too (and they are starting to do this).
And I still don't see how RSS will end Spam. Most legitimate advertisers have stopped using Spam already. The con artists who still Spam know that there are an endless supply of suckers. The only thing that will end e-mail Spam will be to either end e-mail, or create laws that will make e-mail useless.
It's all pull.
.technomancer
I'm not sure what it should be called, but if it ever catches on, about 3 years later it will suck and be called "Microsoft News".
Sigs are bad for your health.
Actually it is exactly like PointCast.
But shhhh, don't tell anyone.
PointCast was a horrible implementation of the idea, but functionally 'identical'. ('push' never was 'push', and PointCast happened to be the agregator. The basic feed and premise was RSS based.
No - for the love of Kibo, people, lets not worry about naming. Let's start building infrastructure that will make use of it. If it proves useful, people will use it. And yes, most people talk about web pages (or internet pages, or the interweb or whatever), but the important point is that an infrastructure was built to the point where it became useful to people outside the technology field. SNMP, FTP, and DNS may not be the most pithily named standards, but they allow developers to build the infrastructure we need. If end users want to call it biff, let them go ahead.
(My apologies to Alan Levine if his site gets /.ed)
And (donning asbestos underwear) let's stop multiplying standards for no apparent reason other than personality conflicts with the originator of a standard.
Even heroes have the right to dream
Here are my recommendations for RSS/news readers for Windows (and other platforms):
If you use the Mozilla browser, NewsMonster is a great RSS add-on. It is cross-platform, and the basic version is free and open source. (There is a Pro version with a bunch more features for a fee.) It installs as a second sidebar in the Mozilla browser, and you can read feeds like you read email in most email clients. It also installs with about twenty popular feeds to get you started. It has a few bugs, but it is my favorite one overall.
Another one is AmphetaDesk. It is also free, open source, and cross-platform. It displays all your feeds in a web page in your browser. It runs in the Windows taskbar, checking ever so often for updates. It's not as powerful as other RSS readers--it's not easy to tell which feeds and articles are new/updated, for instance--but it is rock-solid with no bugs that I've ever found.
But for the discussion. If I want stories I go to El Reg. And then I end up reading every single story anyhow.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Setting up the TuxMobil News RSS feed , which features daily news for mobile geeks using laptops, PDAs and mobile cell phones with Linux, I have also made a survey of RSS news readers, tickers and aggregators for Linux (available at the link above). The survey contains tools for Gnome , KDE, text console, HTML and your favorite X11 window manager.
The only problem with penny e-mail postage stamps is when you need to send a newsletter to 100,000 subscribers.
RSS solves that by creating a new medium for opt-in mass e-mailings, allowing e-mail to diverge into pay-per-play e-mails.
Plus RSS and regular e-mail can appear in the same inbox, thus making the transition seamless.
Philosophistry
"I use it for news sites, meaning I get the news as soon as it is updated, and most news sites (at least not in Norway) doesn't require any form of log-on etc, so no cookies. "
See, this is what I don't get...
You re implying that when some news site adds a headline it send a magic RSS signal that wakes up your computer. This would be pretty cool if it were true.
Of course, if it were true, the same people who Spam would be waking up your computer about a thousand times a second to tell you about Viagra!
RSS is abbreviated HTML (the irony here is that the original HTML syntax was more efficient than todays RSS).
Add, to that the fact that you think this RSS data is being "Sent" to you somehow, when in actuality, something you are running is probably hitting those poor news servers once a minute looking for updates. Even if you go on vacation for 2 weeks leaving your computer turned on, you'll be hitting those servers 20160 times looking for an update.
There is nothing magic about this, rather something very tragic. We've made web browsing so complex and inefficient that we have to invent a new thing to make it simpler again. Only problem is that RSS doesn't replace HTML, it only augments it. You still have to click on those headlines to get the full story, which will take you to the Slashdot page where you will see ALL of the stories, plus headlines from hundreds of other servers that have just now been impacted (plus the fact that your client proggy is hitting those same servers as well).
We seem to have forgotten that the slow part of the man/computer interface is man. Having thousands of feeds updated silently in the background while we watch TV doesn't really make us that much more aware. Just makes us feel like we have accomplished more.
Me on the subject.
Tom Murphy has written extensively on this as well, although his site lacks a search engine so you have to rummage around for relevant articles.
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
Firewire, Firebird, Firefox... just pleeeaaase don't call it FireFeed. Stop playing with Fire!
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
Don't get me wrong, I like feeds in RSS formats, use them a lot, however RSS has a problem: bandwith.
If a site exposes an RSS feed, and 50,000 people subscribe to that feed and refresh that feed every 10 minutes, you get 3mil requests for that feed per hour, you can do the math yourself how much bandwith that consumes if the feed is larger than a couple of bytes.
If you crank out an email with the headlines each day to these 50,000 subscribers, you save bandwith in most cases.
What should be done is that the RSS client first asks the rss feed server if the feed has changed past a given date/time. If not, no fetch is done. Correct me if this is already the case, but I fear it isn't (most rss feeds are dynamically produced, (perhaps with cached contents) so a simple HTTP poll won't do.)
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
It's also worth noting that Slashdot's RSS feed will have more article contents for subscribers in a few weeks
Then call it Greed Feed.
Even though I have a 3.2 GHz box with 2 gigs of RAM and a ATI 9800 TX with 256 mb RAM... yes, Battlefield is awesome at 6xAA, 1200x1000, at ~110 FPS :) back on topic... I will always browse the web using the PDA links if available.
IT'S NOTHING SHORT OF AWESOME. All my sites load instantly, no adverts or maybe just one, and everything is plain text with links underlined, and only a picture or two of whats really relevant. And when I do browse the web on my Treo 600, I see the exact same thing. Lean and mean and consistent.
Here are some links... enjoy!
Slashdot: no special link, just change your settings!
Wired: www.wired.com/news_drop/palmpilot
C|Net (for the M$ fanboyz): cnet.vitalstream.com
MSNBC: www.msnbc.com/avantgo/mmc.asp
BBC: news.bbc.co.uk/text_only.stm
New York Post: www.nypost.com/avantgo/index.htm
Google (yes, even leaner!!!): www.google.com/palm
Give a hand, not a hand-out.
Who stores settings in cookies anyway? Most sites use cookies only for storing the username and password, and this functionality can be replaced by HTTP auth for RSS purposes.
I don't see how this solves the problem that the original poster points out, and I don't see why the original poster was modded a troll.
My /. front page draws articles from a variety of sections, according to my prefs. Someone else's may be different. You could do HTTP auth when fetching the RDF/Atom file, I guess; but then the server'd end up dynamically generating the headline file for the particular authenticated user each time, to provide them with the headlines of areas in which they've expressed interest. And in that case, RSS isn't buying the server much over a regular full HTTP session. Pretty much the only difference is not sending the images along.
"Anything that's not front-paged isn't available through the RSS feed."
.rss feed. Just click on the science section, and click "rss" link at the bottom of the Science page.
/.!
I don't think this is correct. I just loaded the Science page
I don't know if viewing the "slashdot" rss feed and then the "slashdot - science" rss feed counts as 2 refreshes for the "banned from RSS" rule. At this point, I've only had an RSS reader for about 10 minutes. Still not banned from
I agree that RSS is going to be inundated with ads sometime in the next year or two. That's going to suck.
I have my own headline grabber going, and for many many sites I just scrape links rather than depend on some kind of feed. How do I know which links are to stories? In most cases, it's sufficent to just extract links and check hrefs against regexps. For example, here's a regexp that works for NYT:
I run that on index pages for different paper sections, e.g. http://nytimes.com/pages/world/text/index.html.
In some cases, you want something a little more sophisticated, like the ability to recognize certain tags to enable link grabbing only in certain sections of pages, or the ability to programatically skip a set of tags, like a table or a table row. In any event, the solution I ended up allows me to use a text file to describe the sites I want to scrape, with a section for each site that says how to grab links from that site.
It could be your RSS aggregator and I know wired.com doesn't put the full text of their stories in the feeds. A lot of sites do, however. If you want an idea of the kind of sites that are using RSS check out my Bloglines subscriptions or this list of the top 100 feeds.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
and no exclusion whatsoever, nor do I need a Slash module in my reader.
The feed is also updated more than once per hour, so I think your info is a little out of touch with reality.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
as the possible new name, thanks to a piece at LinuxWorld that's linking back to this thread.
If you're interested in the types of content that are available in RSS check out scripting.com's Top 100 RSS Feeds. They generate their statistics from the users who upload their RSS feed list (called an OPML file) to the site.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
why not introduce a new option into http, like modifications-since (similar to if-modified-since)? The server would return a "not modified" state if nothing was changed, and a diff (content-type=text/diff-script?) if there have been changes. For xhtml, this could even be done on a tag-by-tag basis, rather than line-by-line. Servers not supporting this option would just return the full page, or one could use if-modified-since as a fallback. Using the "Refresh" meta-tag, automatic updating every 60 secounds or such would be easy.
yea, i think i would like that.
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
Actually, slashdot has a PDA link: http://slashdot.org/palm/
RSS is a simple simple thing, much like XML is a simple simple thing.
If you check out the spec for it, you'll notice that there is room for lots of handy info. This in it self may not convice you, as you said, how does this beat going to the site and looking for yourself?
There are two primary benefits: 1. Your site can be syndicated or you can sydicate other sites easily! I can put Slashdot headlines in a box on my site for my users to click on! Neat stuff!! Making machines able to homogeneously deal with this data is a big plus.
That brings me to RSS agregators. Unlike a PHP script which will simply snag and update a display on your home page (as suggested above) you can have a window on your desktop with a list of sites in it. Click on the site and you get the headlines without the overhead of graphics, silly scripts, and graphics. It is a matter of taste, but I absolutly love this technology! I have a bunch of blogs and news sites that I try to stay on top of and it's very annoying to open up 20 tabs in FireFox when I can use the FireFox RSS plug in to brows them in a side bar as a list. I ussually have 20 tabs open anyway and this is a great way for me to get my news.
Also, as the article mentions, how can you spam me via this unless the company directly injects the advertisement as one of their headlines? Email is push method while this is a pull method. Pull methods mean that the client can stop pulling, so if spam shows up in my slashdot.rdf, I 'll stop using it.
Hope this is helpful!
Sam
The problem I've had with most of the RSS browsers is that they don't distinguish between what you've read, and what you haven't. They either create a web page (which is sort of tedious to browse), or they ticker-tape the N most recent events. If you're off-line for a while, and N+1 events come through, you miss that first one, and in any case, you have to constantly scan the ticker for new events.
eventwatcher queues messages, and alerts you when any of your feeds has a new event. When you read events, you can trash them, or save them. If you save them, they go into a different queue which you can browse later; if you trash them, they're marked as "read", and don't show up in your queue.
eventwatcher is a KDE app, and it sits in the system tray, alerting you via a tooltip when a new event comes in (and telling you how many events you have in the queue). For an early release of the app, it is amazingly useful; I only have a couple of feature requests, and I highly recommend it.
I'm not affiliated with the project and have had no contact with the author yet.
Is this suggesting that RSS won't be bogged down in commercialised distraction? I dunno if it's just me or not but every time I think of a spammer I imagine a red faced overweight gent screaming "Who the fuck are you to tell me what I can't fill your screen with!?" whilst spittle is flying out of his mouth.
These people believe that it is their god given right to fill the Internet with their... content, and they get incredibly angry and retaliative when someone dares to challenge this.
They will find a way.
If you think Slashdot is a "speed feed", try setting your RSS utility to update from /. every five minutes and see what happens.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
When installing Karamba (KDE tool for putting dynamic content on the desktop), i noticed a perl script on the karamba homepage that would read a rss feed and display it on the desktop. I hacked it a little, to do nicer formating, read multiple feeds and handle different versions of rss, and now i have the headlines from /., kuro5hin, wired, the register and a few more on my desktop. Nice!
/. story this way....
The i missed a way to klick on those headlines and open a browser -- karamba does not support stuff like that. So i hacked the script some more to write html to a file that i have open in my browser, updating automatically. In fact, i found this
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
Interesting how they think RSS feeds are new. I'm in the military and we are actually implementing that for quite a few unclass and class websites! But I always thought we were 10 years behind everybody else... something MUST BE WRONG! ACK!
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
-- listen to interesting music, support independent radio... WPRB
How can you have RSS spam? RSS is opt-in (i.e. you choose what you want to subscribe to), so the advertising in not unsolicited. If you want to opt out, you simply unsubscribe from the feed.
I still think the problem with RSS is the name. It sounds stupid. Let's all call it 'Speed Feed'. Cheesy rhyming will help the non techno elite remember it, and this is a technology that needs to be more widely deployed.
Taco, you're right.. millions have been struggling with the acronym of HTML for years now b/c it's just not "catchy" enough..
-- jimmycarter
I do the same thing. Some other low bandwidth sites I use:
n ?node=ad min/delivery/avantgo&language=palm
MapQuest: mapquest.com/pda/
ITN (ITV News): avantgo.itn.co.uk/
PC World: pcworld.com/avantgo/
The Onion: mobile.theonion.com/
Wired: wired.com/news/avantgo/
Washington Post (not easy to find):
http://media.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dy
Yahoo and Google recently embraced Web feeds, and Microsoft is expected to incorporate tools for managing them in its next-generation operating system, code-named Longhorn.
Funny how Microsoft tried this in 1998 (remember the original Active Desktop?) and everyone hated it. Now that RSS is here, Microsoft has to get on the bandwagon, because the open world did it right.
So much for Microsoft's assertions that our side does not innovate.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
There's the Omniweb 5 Beta preview that has built in RSS streams.
Or if you prefer not to switch browsers, I strongly recommend Slashdock (do a search on Versiontracker for it) to stream in a tonne of RSS feeds.
...i use karamba also to show me a top, /var/log/messages, my inbox and a fortune... using the "program" sensor, you can get it to show almost anything on the desktop. Also, hacking that rss script gave me a reason to learn a little perl;)
BTW: I would really like a "ticker"-style text display in karamba. I tried to code it myself, but having never worked with qt and automake before, i'm having a dificult time to get that to compile...
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this 120 chars is too small to contain.
Not only are all users automatically RSS producers:a /rss/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/andrewducker/dat
but you can take any RSS feed and produce a 'user' from it.
I get all my news on:
http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/friends/news/
which aggregates various news sources into one place.
My Journal
You *still* have to visit the original web page in order to acess the actual content/information. Headlines and summaries are neither content, nor information.
Headlines and summaries are information. Yes, you have to go to the site if you want detailed information but this is not always necessary. It's like skimming through a newspaper by reading headlines and first paragraphs (the latter of which should give you the core details, if the journalist is writing appropriately). You don't have to read the entire newspaper front to back; you skim through and can get the gist of what's going on, without delving into details. And if something does strike your eye, you take the time to [read the article|view the Web site].
A perfect example is how I "read" eWeek via the Zinio digital reader. I look through the table of contents, which includes very short snippets (less than what many RSS feeds offer) that describe the article. Sometimes that's all I do -- if nothing catches my interest, or I don't have time, then at least I have a bare minimum knowledge of things going on in the industry. If I have more time, or if something very interesting is listed, then I click over and read the article.
An RSS feed works the same way. It provides minimal information, from which you can make the decision about whether or not you want to obtain detailed information.
Or, using the example of the RSS feeds provided by the Open Music Registry, the feed lets you know when new music is listed, but there's no need to listen to every new title -- just those that catch your interest. Even if you don't listen to them, you still are aware -- i.e., you've gained the information -- that new music is available. (There's also a site news RSS feed, and each news item is often small enough to fit into the RSS summary, in which case you get all of the content via that feed.)
No Laughing Allowed!
Does anyone remember PointCast?
:-)
Here we go, "push" technology all over again.
Except this time, it isn't the stock feeds, but purported "geek news" sites.
Yeah, that's gonna fly.
Sure, you can infect RSS feeds with advertisements. Feel free. RSS is a whitelisted service where sites choose which sources they want to feature. You put ads in your feed, you get blacklisted. Feel free. It will help us separate the sleazebags from the honorable sources of information.
In spite of the suggestions and all the tests that I have made, I have not cavato a spider from the hole.
T-Mobile apparently started allowing all their subscribers unlimited WAP usage a few months ago, which is the only reason I've played with WAP enough to notice this. How about fixing up your RSS -> WML export? :>
great, just what i need... a way to have a non-dedicated readership. i -want- people to visit my site. more than that, i want people to want to visit my site, in its entirety.
i've used amphetadesk before, myself, and it's not bad, if a bit clunky. and i like the idea of being able to have other site headlines on mine... it's sort of a catch-22. cool tech, can help spread the word of my site and bring new content without much effort - at the expense of someone else being able to do the same with -my- content.
for it to work, maybe it'll require rethinking the way we do things on the web. maybe it'll go the way of entirely custom pages on the user side, and they pull -everything- via RSS or something similar in the future. of course.
allow me to ring your buzzword bell: subscription-based modality for just such a thing. or, via micropayment - if you click a headline and pull the full story, a penny or two is sent to the originating site. though i'm not sure i like either of those options, particularly - it'd be far to easy to fritter away a good chunk of money per month just browsing. then again, by only paying for the stories i want to read entirely, it may not amount to too terribly much.
Can someone explain when the use of the word "feed" changed from being a pushed-on-arrival kind of thing to a pull-on-view kind of thing?
Back in the days of yore, when dragons ate virgins for dinner, and there were still virgins about, a thing called usenet used to be referred to. Typically, knights of the Realm would mention a newsfeed, and it was known that if you were a "real" usenet site, your parent would *push* new data to your news server as it became available.
Now, those poor folk who had tiny disk drives, or who were on a slow connection had the option to *pull* data from their server instead of accepting a feed... but we laughed at them and called them names.
Nowadays, it seems that lots of people talk about RSS feeds, or XML feeds, when they're really talking about pulling data from a source, not being fed data.
So, when did a feed become a slurp?