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Wednesday, March 10, 2004
It isn't how they screw with you. It's where. 
| | Is this just a big company legal team playing hardball anywhere a court might be game? Or is it a real threat to the Web as we know it? |
Publishing 2.0
| | Chad Dickerson at Infoworld says |
| | Over the past several weeks, requests for InfoWorld's Top News RSS feed have regularly exceeded the requests for our home page. This has been going on long enough now that we're certain that it's permanent. I think it's a big deal. |
| | During the business day, we track hour-to-hour performance (using a combination of shell scripts and Analog) and in any given hour, about 8 of our top 10 most requested files are RSS files. The actual numbers are proprietary, of course, but I can say that we have seen significant growth in overall RSS requests just in the past several weeks. |
| | Feels like a tipping point to me. |
| | Me too. It isn't just RSS that's getting huge. It's that more people are getting their Web services without the complicating container we call a browser. What we're stating to see is another Web, alongside the static one we browse like the aises in a store, or the stacks in a library, looking for finished goods to read or buy. This other Web isn't served up the same way as the one we've been browsing for the last eight years. We see it in a news aggregator, or a blog, or a message on a phone, or a search through an engine that only looks for fresh goods. Yes, you can see it in a browser too, but it's different in kind from the static stuff. Most importantly, it's live. |
| | I first heard the best name for this other Web a year ago, from my son Allen, who called it the World Live Web. I was talking to Phil Windley about it yesterday. Here's what Phil wrote: |
| | Why is RSS important? Because it says "here's what's changed on the Web." When I started building Web sites in 1993, it was very clear then that people visit sites that get updated frequently. That's still true. Now, however, we have a new tool, RSS, that tells us what's changed. I no longer have to limit my reading to sites I know get updated frequently. Instead, I get pinged whenever sites I'm interested in change. That's a fundamental shift in what the Web is. In fact, its something brand new. |
| | It's still framed in publishing terms. We still "author," "write" and "post" things called "journals" and "pages." But there's a big difference, and that's currency. The Wide Web is archival. the Live Web is current. That the Live Web also archival doesn't make it any less current, either. |
| | By the way, I think Dave's offer to merge RSS and Atom is a magnanimous one. Now that RSS appears to be crossing a tipping point, it might be worth bringing up an issue I haven't heard anybody talk about: branding. RSS isn't just highly branded at this point; it also means something: Really Simple Syndication. I don't know what Atom means (beyond "universal content publishing standard" which can be applied to a zillion other things). And I haven't heard anybody give us a useful (i.e. brandable) name (other than RSS or a derivative) to the category to which both RSS and Atom belong. |
Getting behind our eight-legged friends
| | I'm looking forward to meeting local ham radio enthusiast K6SGH, and talking about, among other things, the upcoming Tarantula Migration DxPedition, by which migrating herds of radio-activated giant spiders are tracked across the Santa Barbaran outback. What's not to dig about a project that postulates correlations between tarantula migration and sunspot cycles? Or fails to repress scientific impluses such as these... |
| | Clearly, with only limited empirical data, further study must be undertaken to determine if there is a link between the xray solar flux and the migration patterns of the Nojoqui tarantulas. But the graphic seems to imply that the locals might be wrong in their assessment of current tarantula numbers. If the data is correct, this year's migration should be approaching the low numbers of 1997 and not the massive event that has been talked about in recent weeks around Nojoqui. |
| | ...or includes references to "traumatic compation syndrome" in locations where migratory routes and human highways intersect? |
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