RSS Reaches Out for New Networks

loid_void writes "The software and services used to read XML-based news feeds are continuing to branch out as the syndication method gains popularity on the Web." From the article: "More and more companies are starting to use internal content distributed in the form of RSS...Having this content delivered internally in a secure manner is really kind of the sweet spot for [enterprises] right now."

Comments

Re:safari

[ggvaidya]

Opera does this already.

Um, Uno Momento

[Rie Beam]

Goddammit, I'm confused - what exactly makes RSS different from any of these other standards out there for passing off documents? I mean, I realize it makes a good feed and such, but really, there's nothing involved that screams make-or-break. The same with XML, and all of these other buzzword bullshit standards. Can someone actually give me a purpose to use RSS for anything other than circulating feeds?

Re:Um, Uno Momento

[wootest]

Let's see. If you were given the assignment to "parse a web page for data", what would you do? Hell, let's make that "parse anything for data". The first thing you'd do is that you'd find out some tell-tale signs of where information starts and ends. This could be different on different sets of data, or it could be consistent; on a web page, it'll almost certainly be inconsistent between these pages. So what RSS (and Atom, another similar but more extensive format with the same goal that falls under the same buzzword) is is simply an easy format to deliver serial data in. It's not designed to be "portable" like PDF if that's what you're alluding, and it's certainly not designed to be readable from a text editor. It's designed to be easy to parse while containing as much data as possible about each entry in the feed and the feed itself. This is the technology side.

The application side of it all is that you get notified when your feeds change, because most applications continuously check on these feeds and work out what entries are new or updated since last time. These applications also make it a lot easier to be effective, since the process of checking of serial postings on multiple web pages gets streamlined by reading their feeds instead. This isn't for everyone either, but it's heaven in an executable for those who want to stay on top of things, which includes a lot of people.

Re:Um, Uno Momento

[wootest]

My major point wasn't arguing that RSS is the shit for parsing data but that it's easy and popular enough to re-use while being widely supported for delivering serial data. Why did I say "serial data"? Because that's what it's being used for. Why did I say that it's useful for notification? Because that's what it's being used for.

Very few things inside of any RSS spec dictate that any RSS feed must be fetched periodically (there are some more or less standard elements to specify when or how often the feed may be fetched, for instance), or that it must be used for any of notification or reading the syndicated articles in particular. RSS feeds themselves are just convenient containers of data, easily parsed. (And yes, I know that parsing invalid RSS feeds of various origins is a science in itself.)

You're completely right that it has no built-in sense of if part x is related to part y, it simply doesn't need to. The need to point these things out are not yet apparent and useful; the loose connections that can be worked out using timestamps and categories/subjects work for now.

The fact that you bring up Usenet and email makes me believe that you've completely missed the point. RSS feed reading/aggregation for me means being able to read stuff from lots of different sources; Usenet and email are both primarily means of discussion. Content notification via email is just a side gig. Usenet and email gives you the ability to participate in the discussion because that's what it was designed to do, RSS doesn't because it wasn't. There's no shortage of exotic usages of RSS feeds out there, like Gmail's Atom feed for incoming mail, but it's not the primary usage, at least not for me, and I would be prepared to wager that it's not the primary usage for the majority of other users either.

porn via RSS

[metkat]

We found a way to use RSS in porn, which I'm amazed noone else is doing yet. I run a BDSM porn site, we provide two RSS feeds for the weekly updates. One is for nonmembers, and links to a preview of each update, the other is for members, linking to the update itself. Since people still have to authenticate to get to the actual content, we don't have to worry about authenticating the members' feed.

This saves hassle for subscribers and browsers, since they don't have to keep checking back to see if we've updated, plus maybe saves a bit of bandwidth for us. Win for everybody.

The site's Two Big Meanies, the nonmembers feed is at http://www.twobigmeanies.com/updates_rss.php if anyone's interested.

Re:RSS vs. Atom vs. RDF

[handslikesnakes]

RDF (Resource Description Framework) is a meta-language, like XML. Except it's not even really a language, it's a model. Extra confusing because there are different syntaxes available, one of which is XML.

RSS 2.0 (Really Simple Syndication, I think) is what most people are talking about when they say RSS these days. Based on the original RSS 0.9x format, some people complain it's underspecified.

RSS 1.0 (RDF Site Summary) is a completely different specification, using the same basic concept & elements but all in the RDF model. Its detractors claim that RDF is too damned confusing (I won't argue there) and make the usual comments about ivory-tower intellectuals.

Atom's (not an acronym) the new kid, it hasn't actually been released yet but should be coming very soon - within weeks/months. Difficult to say anything about it until it's finalised, but it's got some nice stuff. I particularly like the Atom API. Clean & RESTful, mmm-mmm good. In my opinion (Atom ~= RSS 1.0) > RSS 2.0, but don't take my word for it as I'm fairly new to all this.

Re:Buzzword Bingo

[stonecypher]

A much better idea would be to deprecate email as it is currently used, and actually capture intra-office communication in some issue-tracking system, wiki, or other appropriate system.

It'd be much cooler if you were named Clarke, so I could say "welcome to 2001" all sarcastic-like; now all I have to work with is Gateway, and nobody would get it anyway. But, sure, capturing e-mail is nothing new, and good lord, we've been tracking our communications as threads on a private NNTP server for almost 20 years now. Also, there's been automatic majordomo browsing since Gopher, and back in the days of BlueWave ...

I tend to agree with Flexible. Yes, RSS can be productively used as a way to keep people abreast of changes, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. We have both a bugzilla deployment with email notification and a mediawiki deployment with RSS notification; because they're both gathered by Thunderbird, you'd think they'd be transparent to me, and that RSS would be at least as good as email. This turns out not to be the case: it's very frequent for us to need to discuss issues that come out of project controol and/or bug control, so even what's going around in RSS eventually gets pushed around email anyway, and then it's a giant pain in the ass to find anything. (Google mail would partially ameliorate that due to its search mechanism, but there's no reason for the problem to exist in the first place.)

It's my opinion that you're addressing the wrong question. What's important isn't whether RSS is good enough to use; there are tons of things that are good enough to use. The question should be whether RSS offers any compelling benefits over the existing mechanisms, and to that I suggest that the answer is a resounding "no."

Where I work we started doing this with JIRA and Confluence, both of which offer RSS feeds so that you can stay up-to-date on the changes within those systems. The combination is powerful, and I recommend it without hesitation.

What about it is better than the existing email notification mechanisms, and what justifies moving to something other than the existing well understood mechanisms, causing problems in sorting, especially when RSS is a pull-only mechanism?

Be sure to look into Jot, which has a lot of code dedicated to supporting this sort of stuff, including the relatively odd notion of sending email to a page. Email is just as flexible as RSS; it's just not new, shiny, and buzzwordic. What benefit do you suggest RSS provides?