RSS Power 2

A few more quotes on the potential and impact of RSS:

  • Jim McGee on RSS: “I love RSS and my aggregator. They are the ‘secret sauce’ that gives me immense control over my information environment…
    I get annoyed with sites that don’t provide a full RSS feed and insist on offering snippets or headlines only. Sites that provide no RSS feed essentially don’t exist for me…95% of my online information comes to me by way of my aggregator. For much of what I am interested in — business uses of information technology and knowledge management related topics — important stories hit my aggregator two to three weeks before they show up in conventional online sources.”

  • Robert Scoble: “The biggest thing to happen to the Internet since 1994 [is] RSS. I find I’m using more and more Smart Clients (read: not a browser) to read sites lately. That’s where the Web is moving to. And it’s moving VERY fast. I would not be suprised to learn that more sites today are published as RSS/XML than are published in XHTML…I think our best hope is to get people onto the RSS bandwagon (and other XML-based protocols) and build Smart Clients that take people beyond the Web browser.”

  • Rahul Dave [in response to a post I had written]: Rajesh gets this exactly! There is more to the process of blogging than meets the eye. I’d even go out on a limb to say that making RSS routing natural is probably the most important user interface issue we need to solve. The usual way to read an aggregator is on the web, or local 3-paned app, or in outlook, or in your favorite mail reader thanks to blogstreet’s RSS-Imap aggregator. This adresses the demand side. But we equally well need to address the supply side in RSS, and it is here that everyone has focussed on blogging and has neglected the UI. (A pet peeve is everyone writing their own 3 paned aggregator…whats the originality in that? If you want a 3 paned aggregator use the Outlook plugin or Blogstreet and your emailer.) Why not have all authoring done on an operating system produce a RSS feed. A file needs a summary with an enclosure, thats all. One can then organize according to spaces or projects, and publish to the scope intended, which may be private, or to a group, or to the world at large, comcommitant with a blog pointer..

    The last part of what Rahul says – we are hoping to enable just that, built around the Info Aggregator.


    RSS+T

  • Published by

    Rajesh Jain

    An Entrepreneur based in Mumbai, India.