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The Importance of RSS

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the feeds-are-the-new-push dept.

unfoldedorigami writes "Kevin Hale of Particletree wrote an interesting essay about the importance of RSS and speculates that the success of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and Technorati has got Google worried about subscribe becoming the new search. Hale thinks this is the reason behind why they've become so interested in feed reading and the procurement of revenue from them."

2 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. the important of RSS is.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ..that it's just pure content without any layout or crap. In other words, it makes reading web sites as easy as it was in 1995.

    Of course, at some point they will start putting crap in RSS feeds (they are already putting ads in the feeds.. I agree with Dave Winer: isn't the feed an ad ALREADY??), and someone will re-invent it all over again.

    But for now it's a great way to just read content without crap. Say, that's a good slogan: "RSS: content without crap".

  2. OpenSearch by image · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Actually, the convergence of search and syndication is what led A9 to create OpenSearch. OpenSearch is a standard for search results that, not coincidentally, is built as an extension to RSS. In just a couple of months a few hundred sites have adopted it -- seems like there is a market there. (Disclosure, not that there is a conflict of interest there, but I am the lead for the project.)

    And it's not just for A9 -- anyone can use OpenSearch to syndicate their search to anyone else. One example of a search aggregator other than A9 using OpenSearch is OSFeed. And example of a search engine that can be accessed by anyone is AWS OpenSearch, which lets you search Amazon via RSS.

    So in other words, when done well search and RSS are highly compatible.