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Google Finally Moves Toward RSS Standard
declan writes "My News.com colleague Evan Hansen just got his hands on an internal email thread revealing that Google is planning to embrace RSS. Evan's co-authored News.com article quotes from the email (sent to Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt) confirming that Google is rethinking only supporting Atom. Slashdot covered Google's purchase of Pyra Labs and Blogger.com/Blogspot.com last year that made it a fan of the Atom standard. Does this news mean that RSS is now viewed as out of Dave Winer's control? Will RSS and Atom finally converge?"
...it'd become an RFC at some point.
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Why did atom even come into existance? Was not RSS already established, or is there some kind of deficiancy in RSS that i'm missing here?
Yeah, yeah, the story's about Google, but Slashdot's probably the second most popular website with an RSS feed, and it, um, sucks, to put it bluntly. It's updated infrequently, you're banned if you accidentally load it every 40 minutes instead of every hour, there's only one flat feed for all sections, and so on and so forth. Taco, can you fix your RSS? Setting a good example and all...heck, it's because of Slashdot that we have an additional RSS module!
I do some website development and have actually gone out and looked for decent Atom newsfeeds just out of curiosity. I have never found any (yes I know how to use google, teoma, dogpile, etc...) worthwhile newsfeeds using this standard. Perhaps some of the readers have seen such feeds. I would be very interested to hear of good technical feeds using the Atom standard. Also why Atom? I might be ignorant of what makes Atom a good alternative, RSS seems to work well, but I am new to the scene maybe someone could enlighten me as to why we need the Atom standard.
AC
I've tried several of the clients and have tried to add as many news feeds as I could, but it all seems the same. Little content and just a link to a webpage. I could just go visit the webpage and see the same summaries.
I was expecting something like an AP newswire, with interesting stories from all over the world that I could not find on a standard website. If there's something I'm really missing here, then please let me know.
During the recent call for comments over changing the RSS 2.0 specification, Mark Pilgrim supplied a test case to show that it was a non-backwards-compatible change.
While Dave Winer is supposed to not control the RSS specification, he managed to delete Mark Pilgrim's comments as he has control over the server the comment system runs on.
Mark and Dave don't get on; that's no big secret. But Dave interfered with feedback because of his grudge against Mark. I don't think anybody should claim that RSS is not under Dave's control.
RSS isn't too bad if you ignore all the Dublin Core additions.
When google news first emerged I thought hey, I wish I could just get the headlines as links. Later after I discovered and starting heavily using RSS I e-mailed google and told them that. Then when googles blog came out I was suprised to see it was syndicated. But not with RSS, heck their blog was made with blogger. I expected more from great google. Maybe now they will actually give me my RSS world news headlines I've been waiting for. But hopefully they wont point to news sites that need registration :P
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
It is often useful for sites which would like to carry news but the primary objective of the site is not news. RSS is a standard way to receive the news from multiple sources and parse it using a standard class or function. An example would be an ISP members section. You could provide news stories or even securityfocus.com announcements updated automatically without any additional labor. This is a benefit to both parties in that it adds value to your site while at the same time drives traffic to the news supplier (hopefully for them increasing ad revenue).
hey Google, how about creating a website that is standards compliant, before worrying about RSS feeds and minor sundries, good to see the W3C reccomendations and all that hard work in creating standards in the web browser are not going to waste.
why bother ? its not like it matters right ?
The RSS 2.0 specification is frozen and no new development is allowed under the RSS name. The specification states that any new development must happen in namespaces or in new specifications with new names. Funnily enough, when people actually do that (with Atom, and with "funky" feeds), they are still criticised for it by the people who wrote that part of the spec.
"RSS" as a standard does not exist.
Your post is a good example. What Dave Winer calls "RSS" (0.9x, 2.0) is not based on RDF. That would be "RSS 1.0". Right now, there are three standards going forward: RSS 1.0 (RDF-based), RSS 2.0 (Winer), and Atom.
Part of the problem is that Dave wields veto power in the RSS world, and he hasn't been responsive to others' needs. Like any good open project, his faults have prompted forks (two, in this case).
http://www.petitiononline.com/googhtml/petition.ht ml
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
What do we have to do to convince people that it isn't controlled by Dave Winer or anyone else?
For a start-off, when you ask for feedback on a proposed change to the specification, let people participate, even if Dave doesn't like them. Don't let him hide important feedback because of personal grudges.
RSS is winning. It doesn't matter if Atom is technically superior, or if hating Dave Winer is fun.
Atom is simply wasting space at this point. Sure, the RSS spec sucks. I can't even tell you exactly what an RSS feed is supposed to look like or what all the different versions are. And Dave Winer can't write a well-defined spec to save his life (apparently doesn't understand ISO8601 dates, or Unicode, or that XML defaults to UTF-8). (He views this as a feature, not a bug.)
But in a few minutes I can write a program that generates an RSS feed that works in most aggregators. I don't understand all the vagueries of Atom, and I'm not going to bother learning. I have enough trouble trying to get non-geeks to understand RSS and how it works.
The next step is a big company like Microsoft or Google adopting RSS and accurately defining their own version of it to clear up any remaining confusion. Neither Winer nor Ruby nor Pilgrim have the power to set a standard like that. For instance, we need an easy way to click on an RSS link and have it come up in the aggregator. Radio Userland does it a certain way, NetNewsWire does it another way.
RSS is going to win, if you like it or not.
I can appreciate what the Atom folks are doing, because I like to masturbate too.
The fact is that anyone who tries to improve upon or modify RSS is met with Dave's wrath. And this is precisely why Atom exists.
And yet Dave tries to pass Atom off as a type of RSS. So, in essence, there is nothing anybody can do with relation to syndication without incurring The Wrath of Dave[tm].
This discussion of Google using RSS for Blogger is all well and good, but what about the broader question of integrating RSS into their mainstream search services? By comparison, Feedster searches RSS, and provides its results in RSS. But to get an RSS feed for a Google search you need to use the 3rd party GoogleAlert. Not to mention that Google recently shut down a third party news-to-RSS service. Aren't the guys from the Googleplex supposed to have technological vision or something?
The "RSS 2.0 format is by far the most widely used format. There was a time when it looked like things would coalesce, but then things started to fragment, largely due to Google," Winer said. "RSS deserves Google's respect, and it's not getting it."
Ah yes. Let's translate the first sentence, "RSS 2.0 format is by far the most widely used format. There was a time when it looked like things would go my way, but then people started to use a competing syndication system, largely due to Google"
The line about RSS deserving respect from anyone much less Google just cracks me up. Regardless of which is "better," Google made a business decision to focus on one. RSS deserves nothing from Google or anyone else. It's a specification for crying out loud.
Keeping this in mind, let's now translate the second sentence, "I deserve Google's respect, and I'm not getting it."
That sounds about right. If you are so tied to your creation that you cannot seperate yourself from it then you need take a step back, take a deep breath, and avoid making decisions for your baby until it, and you, have matured.
-Adam
There are some really nice/creative feeds out there that push the limits of RSS.
Amazon for example has a TON of feeds showing what the current top sellers are in virtually every category. Those at the top of the list are the top sellers and so forth.
That's one interesting way of imbedding information into a channel without actually adding textual information. I could forsee a script that takes that (easily parsable) data and turns it into a regularly updated graph. The same thing could be done with screen scraping and the HTML page, but RSS is so much easier to deal with.
We have the local dining services create the week's menu as an RSS text file. It is a simple 10 minute cut and paste job and it appears in our portal almost as soon as it is updated... no more emails telling what the week's menu is and no need having to visit (yet another) web site for the info. I just log into my account (something I do daily) and it is right there.
NASA's earth observatory has a really cool RSS news feed. What I like about their feed is that the tiny (only allowed to be 144 pixel wide x 500 pixel high) image that is usually reserved for a site banner/icon has been co-opted as a snippet of their picture of the day. If you click on it, you are taken to the site with the full image.
I know of a couple of places that are starting to post team scores as rss feeds. I could forsee the ability to do play-by-plays with rss.
A lot of people are doing really cool things with RSS that are outside the bounds of simple headlines. You just have to think about them in a different way.
XML is a standard from the World Wide Web Consortium.
Some RFCs are standards published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Some are not.
Most of the standards document protocols of some sort. Some document tools used to describe protocols, and some of these are languages (ABNF, RPSL).
Some RFCs document protocols that use XML to represent their syntax.
Some of these RFCs are IETF standards.
my newsfeed site saves me a ton of time every day
check it out here: http://fooey.net/Newsfeeds.cfm
just one big page with all the news sites I like where i can see at a glance anything new that pops up
i'm currently working on making it more database driven so I can search for those rouge articles you can never seem to find
something like this one that i'm working on for fark: http://fooey.net/Farkives/
If the top content sites decide to support one format (atom, rss or whatever...) THIS format will be used by most people thus this will dominate.
It isn't about the W3C, Dave Winer, supporters of Atom etc etc.