AR&D Reinventing Local Media

Posted: Sep 13, 2009 7:15 PM

 

A new development in the world of RSS is getting some well-deserved attention in the tech press, and it has ramifications for anybody in the news and information business. RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication," and it's the primary way that unbundled content gets passed around the back end of the Web. One "subscribes" to RSS feeds, which are then displayed in an RSS reader. It'll change your news consuming life, because there's no need to "visit" websites anymore.

Until now, RSS has been what's called a "polling" technology. An RSS reader communicates with an RSS feed by asking, at preset intervals, if the feed has anything new to reveal to the reader ("Do you have anything new?"). By adding an element to the feed, anything new is automatically published to the Web in real time and is pushed to the RSS reader. The big change is time, and RSS has entered the world of Twitter.

And since RSS is a decentralized, distributed technology, there's no server to crash, so no "fail."

Dave Winer is the pioneer of RSS and it's his work that has brought about this change. He's a genius who is driven by the open distribution of information, and he has published a walkthrough of how it all works that is must-reading for Web enthusiasts, a.k.a. geeks.

This new protocol took a huge leap forward this week when Wordpress.com announced that it was enabling the cloud element in all of its feeds. Simultaneously, it released a plug-in for other Wordpress blogs and others soon followed suit. I expect this will become the norm rather quickly, and it has implications for media companies, as Dave suggests.

The idea is to deliver news faster, without relying on a single company to do all the work. Until now you could have one or the other, but not both. You could have the news delivered via RSS, but if you wanted it fast you had to go to Twitter or Facebook or FriendFeed. The problem with going to a company is two-fold: 1. The company might not be able to handle it. 2. The company might screw with it.

He goes on to explain that Twitter fails regularly, because it is in the middle between publisher and user. Its efforts to become the "pulse of the planet" set it up for continued difficulties, despite what the company says. Dave (and many others) also didn't like it when Twitter began recommending feeds, which artificially boosted the followers of those recommended. When people started talking about "buying" such recommendations, the "free Internet" people like Dave responded.

Our goal with rssCloud is to take what was wonderful about Twitter, that got f*cked by their Suggested Users List and the Fail Whales, and make it wonderful again. I want everything fast with no company in the middle. That doesn't mean Twitter goes away, not at all. They just have to stop being in the middle. That's what rssCloud is about. Fast news updates without the company in the middle.

So what Dave Winer has done is to take us back to that which is so disruptive about the Web in the first place — the way it so effectively cuts out middlemen (and their ability to make money from such a position). It reinforces the need for us to get into the distributed advertising business as well, for advertising is a form of information that is increasingly getting comfortable with playing by the Web's rules.

We distribute content. We distribute advertising.

And they don't necessarily have to be attached to each other.

Welcome to the cloud.

(For those who are interested in pursuing this further, here's a conversation between Jay Rosen and Dave Winer about RSSCloud.)