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

Secure? RSS?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing inherently secure about RSS vs. any other format.

Re:Secure? RSS?

[odyrithm]

I'm pretty sure thats the point.. anyone can access the feeds - there just a web page like any else just xml instead of html.

dates!

[odyrithm]

I was just working on a simple php script to pull rss feeds but found most sites only give title, link and description details for the items... why no date? seems nuts. /. does provide a date however, the loverly people.

Old news

[Anonymous Coward]

April 22, 2005

This stuff is soooooo yesterday.

Buzzword Bingo

[Flexible Typhoon]

Ah. RSS. The buzzword of the day.

There are things RSS is good for. Like news syndication.

There are things that RSS is NOT good for. Like, sending and receiving email or most forms of office communications.

RSS is not the panacea

Re:Buzzword Bingo

[pohl]

There are things that RSS is NOT good for. Like, sending and receiving email or most forms of office communications.

I'm not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your analysis, there, Flexible.

The point here is not that RSS should be used for sending and receiving email. Rather, the point is that email leads to lots of problems in office communications...too much valuable knowledge ends up scattered in various inboxes, unavailable to the organization as a whole. Or even worse than that, you end up with a bajillion revisions of miscellaneous documents flying around as attachments.

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.

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.

Re:Buzzword Bingo

[pohl]

The lightbulb didn't come one for me until I tried a really nice RSS reader. It's provides a way to skim large amounts of information looking for nuggets in a very small amount of time. (In my case, it was NetNewsWire). In my opinion the RSS phenomenon is an example of information-consumers re-routing around bogosity, such as poorly designed sites and intrusive advertisements. You could either take control over how you consume information, or you can be a gullet with an upwardly-open maw at the end of a conveyor. Your choice.

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?

RSS Feeds and Wireless Internet Blogging

[evdo-hsdpa-bob]

I gotta tell ya... my evdo-coverage.com website took off after i started blogging. Thank GOODNESS or what ever the MIS equivalent is.. :) for RSS... As far as news... Turner and CNN had it right.. people want to know whats up. 24hours of world news changed the world.

now... how about 24 hours of specialized news for EVERY industry... carve our your niche now... theres room for everyone... by the way.. if anyone as a wireless internet related blog... i'd love to syndicate you at http://wirelessinternetcoverage.com... let me know.. we'll be putting a news section on the site

safari

[izzo nizzo]

I'm psyched that safari will now inform me of when new stories are broken - so I don't have to check the sites myself. This seems like it will save me a lot of time; unless I end up subscribing to rss feeds from hundreds of sites.

Re:safari

[ggvaidya]

Opera does this already.

All sorts of crasy stuff

[zkn]

People are also starting to podcast all sorts of crasy stuff, like videos. Making vLogPodcasts. (And screwing up my playlists with videofiles).

RSS is just another great way of distributing news. Expecially podcasting it with simple programs you just keep running so then down anything new when it arives.

Internally in companies I can see the usage as a "message of the day" sort of thing where anything everyone needs to se is posted. Instead of cluttering up peoples inboxes it's all gathered a centrel spot and people can update by browsing the RSS feed.

The real question is...

[Anonymous Coward]

How many people, like myself, found out about this story because of Slashdot's RSS feed?

Hey, then we could create a server

[Colin Smith]

Which would automatically gather all of the RSS feeds into a single location we could then just subscribe to that one server and pick all the feeds we like...

Hang on, where have I heard of this before?

Re:Hey, then we could create a server

[Jeffrey Baker]

Those who do not understand Usenet are doomed to reimplement it, poorly.

RSS is irrepairably broken, as is any other polling distribution system.

Re:Hey, then we could create a server

[Colin Smith]

The irony is that someone's going to splat an news server onto another port, start dumping RSS feeds into a group heirarchy and charge muppets a fortune for it. I can just see it now.

Re:Hey, then we could create a server

[AndroidCat]

And then Google will pick up those news groups and provide a RSS feed .. round and round it goes!

That's kinda weird...

[Geniusagar]

I got news about RSS in an RSS feed from Slashdot...
Next I'll be getting an RSS feed about RSS talking about RSS talking about RSS talking about RSS...(infinite loop)

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:porn via RSS

[AndroidCat]

Aha! Now RSS has the main driving force of the Internet behind it.

No one ever pays attention

[kiwidefunkt]

Didn't we just read about how PR begets bullshit news stories? Case in point: TFA. Really, there's nothing but crap in that article. Taking a step back, it looks like it has a lot to do with Rojo's launch and a bit to do with NewsGator. Of course, we all know the best aggregator is going to be Gmail...once it trickles down. For now, Bloglines will suffice. And no, reading/subscribing to hundreds of feeds does not take more time than actually visiting all the sites. What the hell?

Re:Why RSS sucks

[Khuffie]

You compare RSS to Usenet...why? They're not the same thing, and aren't meant to be. Usenet runs on a different protocol; requires a different method of viewing it. And the main point of Usenet is discussion and communication, not content syndication. Its a tool for people to discuss and communicate with each other, and not for content providers to syndicate their content.

You mention that RSS has no means of viewing older content, and again I'd say its not meant for that. It's meant to be used to show what's the latest thing out there on the site, and if archival systems were implemented it'd likely take out the 'simple' from the name.

Here's how I use RSS. That site is set as my homepage, and uses the wonderful Magpie RSS PHP script to parse the RSS feeds. Instead of having to check all of those sites to check for updates a few times a day, all I do is go to my homepage (from any browser, not just my machine), and voila! I can instantly keep up to date with my favourite sites!

SIGNED RSS

[Corpus_Callosum]

There is a need for signed RSS for a number of reasons:

* It will be no-time before we start to see fake articles and whatnot directing us to fake merchants and fake bank sites trying to phish us and other nonsense
* Without signed articles / Signed RSS, there is no-way, other than finding and verifying the original content source, to ensure that a feed is authentic

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.