JG etc.

Steve Rubel, whom I had a chance to meet this week and really enjoyed my time(Jeremiah’s write up), has blogged about wanting to have an RSS appreciation day. The only problem is that maybe it shouldn’t be an “RSS” day, maybe it should be a “feed” day. What are we appreciating here? I think we want to appreciate and celebrate XML syndication technologies like RSS, Atom, OPML, etc.

Mainstream Adoption

The more we label technologies without fully exposing their market intention the more we will have Forrester surveys showing low adoption rates. RSS is not the end all when it comes to feed syndication, for example, check out Rogers Cadenhead’s blog, he is the chairman of the RSS Advisory Board, and he is using an Atom Feed! There is way too much infighting to try and declare that a standard like RSS should be the default “term” worth promoting to the masses. And even if it was adopted and accepted by everyone, is that what we want to call it? When I think about feed technologies I wonder if it is the same problem that TV must have had promoting their technology features. They seemed to settle on terms like, “broadcast” and “channel”. That is why I like the term “feed”. I think that a “web feed” could be adopted by people as an extension of broadcast or channel, but for the web. They act in very similar ways, providing information and access on demand. So instead of using acronyms that people are going to instinctually ask for an explanation on, use words that make sense. Think about other terms that have been adopted online, “Web”, “Net”, “Email”, etc. The web’s protocol is http, but no one calls it that. I can’t remember the last time someone used SMTP instead of Email, even though it is an acronym and one, like RSS, that makes sense, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.

Subscribe to my RSS Feed

I will use Steve Ruebel’s blog as an example. He has a Feedburner “feed“. That feed is no longer just an “RSS” feed. Through Feedburner’s technology, that feed has a feature called Smart Feed, which translates Steve’s feed on-the-fly into a format (RSS or Atom) compatible with his visitors’ feed reader application. So does Steve have a “RSS” feed, “Atom” feed, or a “Feedburner” Feed? It doesn’t really matter to the end user or the 70% of people we are still trying to get to adopt the technology. What does matter is that Steve has a feed and that is what the user wants. (Aside: Google’s Blogger, the largest BSP among novice and beginning bloggers, by default, displays an Atom feed. That is million of blogs and even more millions of blog readers that really can’t benefit or even understand a RSS appreciation day.)

Kudos to Steve who really has done a great job of bringing the concept of feed syndication to the mainstream(Steve’s RSS posts). We do need to have an appreciation day, let’s just give it a different name.