| Think Outside the Feed | Thoughts on the emerging use of RSS by Bill French and F. Andy Seidl, Co-founders of MyST Technology Partners. | |
| | | February 26, 2004 | | I guess RSS is making a splash. | Soon the entire world will be polling for everything - every 15 minutes. Whoops! That would be bad. ;-) | | |
| | February 19, 2004 | | Smart Tags have been the subject of controversy since created, but they are not that different, so why all the hub-bub? | I have never agreed with the Web community concerning the uprising against Smart Tags. This was a paranoid reaction without a complete understanding of the technology. As I recall, the NY Times started the revolt in 1999 and it has persisted as a source of controversy for years now. IMHO, Microsoft did the right thing - making it easier for companies to build solutions that provide magical discovery and relevance to information sources. What most people seem to miss about Smart Tags is the element of publish-subscribe; you don't see tags on terms that you haven't subscribed to, and you decide what subscriptions are important to your role or interests. This model is identical to the RSS pub-sub process, so why all the hub-bub? Furthermore, anyone that blocks Smart Tags in their web pages is blocking what I have chosen for my information experience. I happen to use Smart Tags when looking at other peoples Weblogs because the tags call out subject matter that my firm knows more about. When looking at a Weblog (for example) I can immediately see the terms that are important to me. This is an excellent way to quickly understand whether the writer is like-minded or discussing things that I also find important. Microsoft has done a phenomenal job of creating a knowledge syndication framework for Office documents that you've written or have ever written in the past or the future. This is a very powerful model; one that we'll all need as the information tsunami approaches land. There are many use cases for Smart Tags, for example, MyST Technology Partners builds enterprise services that Smart Tag-enable collections of RSS feeds. Imagine the surprise on your CEO’s face when she opens an Outlook message to see that a direct link to your Weblog comments about optimizing ‘overseas shipping’ is magically visible to her and instantly accessible with a single click. So why all the controversy? Simple – people don’t understand that Smart Tag collections are subscriptions just like RSS feeds, and in fact, RSS can be transformed into Smart Tags and Office Research Task Pane services. | | |
| | February 10, 2004 | | Here's a synopsis about the intersection of RSS and large (traditional) content management firms. | | In my view, these firms are struggling because of many factors such as Weblog tools, open-source CMS's, RSS, and the general trend to use loosely-coupled services to solve complex content management problems. I believe the days of monolithic content management systems are over - replacing them will be federations of services not provided by any single vendor, but seamlessly integrated with business process and workflow. | | |
| | February 07, 2004 | | RSS is free, open, and standard (well, sort of), but that does not--and should not--imply that all information is free, open, or standard. (Sorry, Jim.) | |
The RSS free-for-all is picking up steam. It's getting more and more
difficult to find a technology pundit who does not have something to say about
RSS. That's good. RSS is important. It's not a cure for cancer
and it has lots of wrinkles, but it is a very useful technology for moving
information from one place to another.
RSS is a technology; a way of doing something, specifically, a way of
moving information from point A to point B. ASCII is also a technology; a
way of doing something, specifically a way of encoding alphanumeric characters
as 7-bit integers. These technologies are building blocks for
applications, specific use cases addressed by software using those
technologies.
Debates about the proper use of a technology, such as the one triggered by
Jim Louderback's recent eWEEK article, Keep
RSS Free for All, are, frankly, silly wastes of time and pixels.
Jim seems to be arguing that since RSS (the technology for moving information)
is a free and open standard, that the information being moved by RSS
should also be free and open. Sorry, Jim, that makes about as much sense
as suggesting that all ASCII documents should be freely available to anyone with
the technology to read ASCII.
Greg Reinacker, of NewsGator
Technologies, has built an information service for which he charges a usage
fee. He is not the first to have done this, nor will he be the last.
The fact that this service makes information available via RSS does no more to
create a "walled garden" around RSS than does the fact that the information is
encoded in ASCII does to create a "walled garden" around ASCII.
Technologies are not applications. A sign of a good technology is that
it can be used in many different applications. RSS is a good technology
that will be put to more and more uses, some freely available, some not.
Whether you need to move information for free or for pay, you are free to use
RSS to do so. | | |
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