John Resig has a very nice RSS to JSON converter.

We’ve been working on a JSON output to Solr (Lucene) for Wists’ search and I’m now convinced that JSON is the way forward for RSS and webservices in general.

John Resig - RSS to JSON Convertor

Over the last six months I have kept meaning to switch to outline style blogging.

For all the hoo ha about OPML as a standard for reading lists - you might reasonably ask why not use RSS - after all RSS is often used for playlists so what could the difference be?

The difference is really fairly subtle, but also very important, and the real answer has nothing to do with syndication, but the process of writing and what people who evangelize outliners have been trying to persuade people for years.

The comments on Anil Dash: Outlining a Blog are a really clear illustration of the problem.

Later generation blogging tools were designed with the influence of RSS which in turn was influenced by news headline syndication.

This meant that every post had a headline and with only one default template for post styles post templates tended to look like news stories with a big bold headline and text beneath.

If you want to post small snippets, the news story style format is a problem. If you put the headline in the body, then what do you use for the headline? If you use the snippet as the headline, the bodyless post looks empty and you can’t put links to sites mentioned in the snippet in the headline.

Non outline style blogging leads to the type of writing where you feel compelled to make every post a mini essay. This is bad for both writers and readers - since most people don’t want to read essays about everything and most bloggers don’t really want to write essays about everything.

The headlineless style allows people to write more freely and more often, note style - what blogging is about.

Reading through the comments on Anil’s site my gut feel is that the solutions to this are:

Multiple styles for post templates - headline or essay.

Dates/times as default headlines in syndicated outline style posts.

Named anchors as permalinks for individual entries within an outline style list post.

Ability to nest OPML within RSS within OPML namespace or use separately for a pure list.

(BTW- if anyone reading this knows - how are images handled in OPML?).

Some people don’t seem to like Google Base - I like it a lot and I’m sure that its a product that will gradually evolve into something truly revolutionary.

So far nobody has been able to touch Ebay, but one gets the impression that since they are an effective monopoly Ebay have become very conservative with their product, not wanting to risk innovation which could mess things up.

This leaves others who innovate with an opportunity, and Google will innovate here.

The people that pay Ebay - the sellers, would switch if they could, but Ebay has the buyers. Only someone like Google could offer a rival marketplace of buyers.

As an aside - since the single item Google Base upload allows you to define your own metadata via custom name-value pairs, does that mean that with bulk uploading Google will intelligently parse RSS modules in their own namespaces?

If this is the case then RSS has taken one mighty leap forward.

Niall Kennedy has a fair idea that Microsoft may be about to launch RSS search.

Dave Winer on ads in RSS

“The feeds themselves are ads for the stories they link to, which are revenue-generators. Anything that keeps people from clicking, that confuses them, takes them off course, is going to drop the click-through rate.”

here here.

There are only three possibilities for ads in RSS:

1. where the feed is an aggregated feed or search result from many sources, then the ad is similar to what the search engines do (but this is a volume game - the individual ad revenue is less than at the destination site).

2. where MOST of the RSS ad revenue is given back to the publisher - so that the publisher can decide whether the ad revenue outweights the potential revenue from the added traffic.

3. Where the RSS feed is full content - although to be honest most people can make more revenue off fancy advertising at the site where the headline links to.

But as Dave points out, if you really think it makes sense for 2. then people aren’t really reading your stuff anyway.

Tagging
Tagging, i.e. on-the-fly user generated keyword categorization looks like it is becoming the standard way to categorize weblog content, replacing things like fixed pre-set categories. In other words items are categorized at the point of posting, at the level of individual posts rather than according to a pre-existing taxonomy.

Linkblogging and bookmarking
In addition it looks like the there is an intersection between bookmarking and weblogging, where

OK, for a perfect example of the absurdity of not looking before legaling:

Lawyer writes a blog about trademarks.
Lawyer includes not for commercial use Creative Commons licence.
Lawyer notices that people can read his entire blog reformatted in Bloglines.
Reaction: lawyer goes batshit (new word stolen from Jeff) and sends cease and desist to Bloglines and posts about it.

Suggestion: perhaps not having syndicated full content RSS would have been simpler.

David Berlind has done his homework in What’s wrong with RSS is also what’s right with it. The first sensible piece about RSS all year.

The reality of RSS is that modules have been a failure, and that leaves RSS as a standard for headlines and links and a miscellaneous catch all called description or content.

As Berlind points out you dont always have headlines and links are sometimes ambiguous, so that leaves us looking at a rather naked emperor. But that doesn’t mean to say that RSS isn’t useful as a meme if not a standard.

Dave Winer on RSS ads in feeds without full content:

“To read the full article you have to click on a link and (listen very carefully now) see an ad as you read the article. In other words, the RSS feed is itself an ad, pulling you in to read a page with a big ad on it.”

This is true, but then again, Google makes most if its money by serving up pages of links with ads alongside, the links pointing to pages that in turn are often ad supported.

If double-dip advertising works for search engines why shouldn’t it work for feeds?

The real growth in blogging and syndication is amongst Xanga and Livejournal users and these systems are walled gardens. RSS and syndication are an anathema.

Good lowdown on Zephoria:

“[young people] use the Profiles in IM to find out if their friends updated their LJs or Xangas, even though they are subscribed by email as well. The only feed they use is the LJ friends list and hyper LJ users have figured out how to syndicate Xangas into LJ.”

apophenia: a culture of feeds: syndication and youth culture