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Friday, December 5, 2003
Help with RSS 
| | Terry Heaton wants to know how to get RSS happening on The Pomo Blog (a good and worthy one it is too) which is produced by a CGI script as part of a larger Website. Can anybody give him a hand? |
Radiwhoa
| | He also turned me on to WBZB/1090, a little daytime AM station out of Selma, NC, Southeast of Raleigh, but with a signal on the Web as well. So I'm listening right now. |
| | Here's the real cool deal: the station only plays local artists. |
| | My only complaint (a minor one) is that they say "In order to listen to the WBZB web stream you must have a Winamp player..." |
| | Not so. Anything that decodes .pls will do: IMMS, RealPlayer, iTunes, whatever. |
The Syndies
| | Something "big" is afoot. The Dot-Com Bubble has burst -- but it's not the end of the story. In fact, it's just the beginning. From the wreckage of the Bubble, a bold new generation of technologies is emerging. Nature abhors a vacuum. |
| | Originally developed by Netscape, a new technology called RSS has risen from the dead to ignite the next-evolution of the Net. RSS represents the first step in a major new paradigm shift -- the birth of "The Metaweb." The Metaweb is the next evolution of the Web -- a new layer of the Web in fact -- based on "microcontent." Microcontent is a new way to publish content that is more granular, modular and portable than traditional content such as files, Web pages, data records, etc. |
| | On yesterday's Web, information was typically published in large chunks -- "sites" comprised of "pages." In the coming microcontent-driven Metaweb, information will be published in discrete, semantically defined "postings" that can represent an entire site, a page, a part of a page, or an individual idea, picture, file, message, data record, or comment. Metaweb postings can be hosted like Web pages in particular places and/or they can be shipped around the Net using RSS in a publish-subscribe manner. Webloggers for example create microcontent every time they post to their blogs. Each blog posting is a piece of microcontent. End-users can subscribe to get particular pieces of microcontent they are interested in by signing up to "channels" using "RSS Readers" that poll those channels periodically for new pieces of microcontent. |
| | RSS resembles traditional "publish and subscribe" except that it scales to the entire Internet and is based on new XML open standards. Unlike over-hyped "push technology" RSS and the microcontent model is based instead on "pull" -- RSS Readers poll channels for new content and pull it down instead of having it pushed at them -- thus the control is in the hands of opt-in end-users instead of content pushers. These differences, combined with open HTTP protocols and XML formats have led to rapid adoption and viral spread of RSS technologies -- principally within the Weblogging and information services communities. But that's about to change. |
| | RSS is poised to become The Next Big Thing. There are many reasons for this -- for one thing, e-mail is no longer useful as a content distribution, alerting and marketing medium. |
| | Okay, let's hold it right there. I don't have any problems with Nova's estimation of RSS's importance. But I do have some, well, minor problems with two perspectives that seem to overlap here. One is that the dot-com bubble is a meaningful context. The dot com bubble didn't create the Net when it appeared, and it didn't damage the Net when it vanished. It was hugely important to businesses and product categories that were involved in it, sure. But I think it's a red herring in respect to what RSS is fundamentally about, which is syndication. |
| | What RSS did was add syndication to the portfolio of functionalities that are possible over the Net. And it's hugely important. World changing, even. The fact that anything or anybody can send out a notification that anything has been pubished, or broadcast, or whatever — and that it can be perceived by any variety of people, devices or intermediating code at the other end, is just huge. I mean, really, really huge. But it's not so huge that it changes The Web or the Net into something else, which is why I'm not crazy about "The Metaweb." (More about that below.) |
| | Which brings me to my other minor problem, which is with "content." I hate the word. I don't think of what I write as "content." I'm a writer, not a 'content producer.' Content is a dot-com word, or at least one that showed up when the dot-com thing was going on. As John Perry Barlow put it, "I didn't start hearing about 'content' until the container business felt threatened." |
| | On the positive side, I think Nova is hugely right about what I bold-faced in his text above. RSS isn't a wet dream by big publishing or big broadcasting. It's a way those with a hunger for knowledge can get high off revelation. And it's not just for people. Devices can slake their thirst for syndicated info too. Radio stations can inform radios when songs are played. Home sprinkler systems can be notified when rain is coming. |
| | The act of syndication is a statement about the willingness of something to be known. I think that's the key. This "meta" business sounds to vague to me. When I explain RSS to people and use "metadata," their eyes glaze. When I use "syndication," their eyes shine, because they know exactly what I'm talking about. It's a real word. |
| | What other real words can we use to make sense out of the Really Big Thing that's going on here? |
O Dear
| | I don't see any change in the main searches where this blog here has done well: weblog and weblogs. Ego-surfing results are down by about 50,000, but they've been up by as much as a million, so who knows. |
The H word
| | If you hit SCAN on your car radio's lo-fi band, you can't miss hearing at least a few seconds of the 3 new Rs: Rightwing Rant Radio. Yesterday I was treated to the irony of hearing Sean Hannity go on and on about how Howard Dean and his crowd are motivated by "hate" for George Bush, whom they consider "evil" — after hearing Rush Limbaugh and his listeners lather a layer of loathing all over Hillary Clinton. |
| | Anyway, Mike Sanders points to The Rise of the Anger Industry in Time Magazine, and adds, if blogging isn't the citadel of partisan pundity, then I don't know what is. He asks, How can we as bloggers stop contributing to this hate filled world? |
| | Easy. We can keep listening with open minds. I say "keep" because I think we already do that a lot more here than on rage radio and TV shows, where everybody yells at each other from fixed and uncompromising positions, as a matter of policy. |
| | Deborah Tannen wrote a whole book about The Argument Culture a few years back. Didn't do much good, since that culture still rules on commercial radio and TV. But I think it's the exception here. |
| | Could we do better? Sure. But I think our manners are already a lot better than the broadcast media. |
| | [Later...] This from the email bag: |
| | ...the big difference between Rant Radio and Ranting Bloggers is that I can't avoid the former and I can the latter. |
| | On the road yesterday I wanted some traffic and weather. Fine, but scanning the dial, I had to put up with a load of ranting to find what I wanted. I had to listen to chose, weed through to find. Radio has no index. No search by content. |
| | On the web, I put what I want in a search and I get the info. I may have to scan a Google list but I don't have to read the content of each. Yes, I set my "favorite" like my dial, but no one in controlling the content or limiting the choices. |
| | With radio I am relegated to being a consumer, with the Internet I am a customer. |
| | Plus more in the discussion section. |
Whoever
| | Markets, it is said, are a conversation - producers, consumers and others have a voice. And consumers are using technology to change the conversation. |
| | ...this article... takes a lot of ideas from the Cluetrain, and David noted that Doc's comment that "Markets are Conversations" has now entered the great domain of the unattributed." |
| | It's worse than that. I know Steve Lohr, sort of. (That's him in the middle there.) We've been on a number of panels together (perhaps just one, I dunno... I lose track of these things). Anyway, he knows from Cluetrain. Or should. (I just got the latest Chinese version in the mail a couple days ago, so I know it's still selling away out there.) |
| | But shit, y'know, if he bought the whole Cluetrain thing, or even part of it, he'd be writing about customers and not just "consumers." But hey: he does spend a bunch of time talking about Eric von Hippel's cool work at MIT, so, whatever. It's cool. |
| | Also cool is this fine jive, which wraps the piece: |
| | At the Almaden Research Center of I.B.M. in San Jose, Calif., researchers regard social-network technology as one aspect of what they term "relationship-oriented computing." Its prototype project in the field is Web Fountain, a large supercomputer that digests most Web pages and other online information. |
| | Using search, business intelligence and text analytics technology, I.B.M. researchers can look for trends, buzz and hints of shifting consumer attitudes as evident from Web postings. I.B.M. hopes to sell this market intelligence as a service to companies. |
| | "It's the collective I.Q. of the Internet coming to your aid," said James C. Spohrer, director for services research at Almaden. |
| | To enlarge the Domain of the Unattributed (DOTU), I'll point back to a few of the places where somebody around here said "Markets are relationships" long before these IBM dudes. |
| | Got that Steve? Next time, okay? Cool. |
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