Month: March 2003

TECH TALK: RSS, Blogs and Beyond: RSS Mailbox

Last week, we saw how RSS and Blogs are bringing forth a new era of microcontent and nano-publishing. This week, we will discuss a few ideas revolving around RSS and Blogs.

RSS Aggregators (also known as News Readers) have been around for some time. Their popularity has been largely limited to bloggers. How can they be made to have greater mass-market appeal? It does make sense for each of us to get information (or events) pushed to us through RSS feeds that we subscribe because it amplifies our ability to process information. The idea Id like to propose is a Hotmail-like hosted RSS Mailbox service.

What this RSS Mailbox does is provide a POP/IMAP account into which RSS feeds that a user subscribes to are delivered. The user can add this account into his mail client. There it just shows up as another mail account. The user can then use client- or server-side filters to separate incoming RSS feeds into folders. The mailbox is also accessible from a browser-based front-end, just like a Yahoo or Hotmail account. So, in a sense, it looks and feels just like a mailbox, but is free from spam because only the feeds that the user subscribes to are delivered.

What the RSS Mailbox does is to enable the use of the email client as an RSS feed viewer. In fact, if one sees the RSS Aggregators, most of them use a 3-pane format, with the left pane showing the list of subscribed feeds, the top right pane showing the item headlines,and the bottom right pane showing the actual item, with the appropriate permalink for the item. With this kind of similarity in look-and-feel, why not just use the email client as the viewer? This eliminates the need for users to download and install a separate News Reader program. All that is needed to access the RSS Mailbox is to add an account into the email client.

If this is the case, then why not just set up an RSS2Mail feed? This way,the RSS feeds can be emailed directly to a users existing email account and the user can equally well set up the appropriate filters. The reason I have not advocated this approach is that we are getting too many emails anyways in most of our existing accounts, so separating RSS feeds may not be easy (they could be spoofed by spammers). Also, by setting up a separate hosted service, the RSS Mailbox is accessible even outside corporate firewalls and through a browser. Of course, organisations could set up their own RSS Mail Servers internally.

On the backend, the RSS Mailbox Server would become a Google-like collector and sorter of RSS feeds. It would fetch the RSS feeds from news sites and blogs as soon as they are updated (if the sites ping it) or would do the botting periodically. It would then parse the feeds into the individual items, and distribute them (using a local mail infrastructure) into the mailboxes of the users who have subscribed to the feed. The RSS Mail Server would thus need to fetch a feed only once per site, unlike today when every blog which subscribes goes out and gets the feed. Of course, this means that the RS Mailbox Server would need to have plentiful bandwidth and storage.

The side-effects of this approach are many. From the users point of view, there is a convenience. Just as one goes to Google when one is searching for content, one would go this RSS Mailbox Server for searching and subscribing to RSS feeds. In addition, by using collaborative filtering techniques (the way Amazon does), the service could also recommend other feeds and items that the user may be interested in based on what others with similar interests are reading. Take this further, and it could create clusters of like-minded readers. The RSS Mailbox Server could this become the ultimate reader-driven content-filter.

Tomorrow: Events Horizon

Continue reading TECH TALK: RSS, Blogs and Beyond: RSS Mailbox

Two Indian Days

Someone had written a few months ago that India’s near-term future rested on what happened on Feb 28 (the Indian Budget) and Mar 1 (the India-Pakistan Cricket World Cup match). Well, both events have taken place and the verdict is out – India is Rising.

The Budget presented by Finance Minister Jaswant Singh was quite a positive one – well-detailed and thought-out (like the man he is), and growth-oriented. He has some limitations considering that general elections are due in India next year, but overall, he has done a good job. It is now for Indian industry to deliver. There is a lot of emphasis on infrastructure development, which India so desperately needs. Concessions for the IT sector continue, and pharma and biotech have been equated to IT.

The India-Pakistan cricket match was a scorcher. For many in India, this was like the final. Or even a proxy war. The two countries had not met on the field in recent times. The match was a delight to watch. Pakistan’s good score was pulversied with the Indian batting in the first few overs. In the end, India won quite easily. These were a few hours when the nation put aside everything and watched on TV.

So, India’s come out with flying colours on both counts. Perhaps, its just my personal bias, but one can almost sense that positive optimism in most walks of life.

On a personal note, as I watched the Budget and the World Cup on TV, a strange feeling overcame me. For most of the past many years, I was used to doing updates on IndiaWorld for both these events. We had updated the budget live for the first time in March 1995, a day after IndiaWorld was launched. We would watch it on TV and then update our Internet website. It was something which continued for many years. So also for the World Cups. 1996 and 1999 were spent in the office making sure our live coverage went well. So, it was a bit odd sitting in front of a TV!

A NetFlix for Books

You Are What You Queue is the story of Netflix and the addiction with setting up queues of which movies to watch. Writes NYTImes:

“We call it the Queue obsession, and about a third of our customers have it,” said Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix. “They visit their lists three or more times a week and look at it the way they look at their stocks. ‘What’s on the list?’ `What should I move around?’ Honestly, I’ve heard of people who have more than 400 films in their Queues.”

My current list of 45 movies may pale by comparison, yet I know I’m a victim of the addiction. For instance, I just checked my Queue to get the latest count for this article. As I did that, I remembered seeing a commercial featuring Jackie Chan earlier in the day. That reminded me of my favorite Chan film, “The Legend of Drunken Master,” which I hadn’t seen in a few years. So in the space of one paragraph, my Queue count has risen to 46.

That’s how Netflix gets you. I can’t recall any previous service that allowed movie lovers to quantify their fixation with such detail.

Once you start free-associating about films, the service’s vast collection makes the process nearly impossible to stop. Nearly everything starts reminding you of movies you always wanted to see but never got around to, or that you saw once and never forgot, or that you are curious about although you were too embarrassed to catch them in the cineplex.

I was wondering why a similar kind of “rental” service cannot be done for books in some of the world’s developing countries. Yes, the neighbourhood libraries are there, but many have shut down or become smaller, since revenues have dried up and real estate has become much more expensive. Running a centralised service where 2-3 books can be sent each time to readers could be a workable idea.

More than watching movies and TV, the next generation has to read. And if we can take away the cost of ownership of books and make it easier and cheaper, perhaps they will.

Presentations Links

I have added a section in the right column for my Presentations. Have given links to the blog posts which link to the four presentations I have made in the past 6 months.

Much of the thinking for my presentations happens in this blog and the Tech Talk columns. What a presentation does is nicely summarise for others what one is thinking. A limitation is that the presentation is at best an outline. It does not present the complete thinking the way elaborate writing (or talking) does. But still, they give a quick flavour of what I am thinking.

eGovernance Presentation

As promised, I have uploaded the presentation (PPT File, 148K) I gave earlier this week to the Madhya Pradesh government in Bhopal. The title is “Emergent Democracy: Enabling an eGovernance Ecosystem”. The inspiration came frm an article I read by Joi Ito.

The basic themes are two: (i) how to create a mass-market tech utility by setting up teleinfocentres in every village (driven not by state subsidies or funding, but by entrepreneurs and with a viable business model), and (ii) building out an intelligent, real-time egovernance infrastructure.

[Since I have mentioned costs in Indian Rupees, the conversion rate is Rs 50 = 1 USD.]

Will write a Tech Talk based on the presentation soon, to elaborate on the ideas outlined and subsequent thinking.

Thanks to all who gave ideas and suggestions in response to my earlier post.

Red Herring Closure

Reading about Red Herring’s shutdown is sad. For me, I have been a reader and subscriber for many years. I liked the mag a lot – it helped shape some of early thinking on the Internet. It was one of my first buys when I used to visit the US in the mid-1990s. I have a lot of the early copies of the magazine, and every copy of the past 3 years or so. I guess the world around Red Herring changed, and they tried to remain independent for too long.