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

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.

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.

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.

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

[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.

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)

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.