|
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. | 
