I’ve heard three people refer to the ‘RSS space’ at Web 2.0. This is dangerous hype. RSS is not a space, its a description of a way to transport links with clean titles.

Advertising in RSS feeds will probably be worth $100 - $150 million within the next 18 months, and RSS readers will eventually be baked into all browsers as a fancy bookmarking feature - and that’s it.

If people wanted to get excited about a piece of geekery that weblogs have helped drive then ping servers would be a better thing to look at. If you become the king of all ping servers then you have something that is a real threat to the core business of search engines.

When quantitative information such as price appears in RSS product feeds, then ping servers are hugely valuable and search engines based on crawling are fundamentally broken.

Kinja launches, well done Meg and Nick.

My first impressions:

Categorizing weblogs is difficult because weblogs are not often about one subject, so the Kinja categories are not the thing that interests me most.

The single thing that I like most about Kinja is the public digest. Weblogs are about people and Kinja allows to me to read what another person is reading arranged how I am used to reading weblogs - as a weblog. In geek terms I can now read the posts from the sites in someone’s blogroll as a weblog.

I would like a link at the top of my blogroll that says ‘get on the same page as me’ by reading the sites in my blogroll as a Kinja powered blog. Others could read the daily newspaper that I read and I could read what they do.

When you are organizing things you usually have a miscellaneous category for stuff you are not sure where to put. If the miscellaneous category becomes too big then you haven’t really organized things properly.

With Amazon’s product RSS feeds, has RSS broken ‘out of its news-and-weblog-tracking ghetto’ as Loosely Coupled suggest?

RSS is XML and XML allows you to put things in tags that say what they mean - metadata. News has headlines and products have descriptions, so Amazon logically puts the descriptions in the ‘description’ tag.

Here’s the problem? Where does Amazon put the price information. Logically, you would think, in a price tag, since RSS is now extensible. The problem is twofold:

1. people are often nervous about creating their own modules or tags for RSS, there is no simple web forms interface for example that will build one for you (using your email address as a namespace perhaps).

2. aggregators do not read or display all RSS metadata, so putting the price in a price tag might actually make things worse.

With only four things to organize (product name, price, link, product description), Amazon is forced to shoehorn the price of an item into the description tag, the ‘miscellaneous’ bucket.

There are other bits of metadata in the Amazon descriptions, author, publisher etc., and since RSS has taken off because of simplicity, I’m not suggesting that Amazon adopt some hugely complicated committee-driven standard for a book seller module. But price is important, something that really needs to be marked as such to be useful.

RSS is a very good way to syndicate links with clean titles (believe me, this solves a big problem for news aggregation), but until it regularly uses fundamentally important metadata such as prices, then it hasn’t really grown out of the news and weblog ghetto.

Email marketers have a big problem. HTML email is a better marketing medium and is more trackable than text email. This is because remote content such as images can be loaded as the email is opened and used to monitor impressions. Even if payment is for clicks and these are tracked, the impressions to conversion ratio is a must have.

Unfortunately, email clients are soon going to block dynamic content in email making it impossible to track impressions directly. This, coupled with the fact that up to 40% of HTML email doesn’t get to its destination because of spam filters, has lead people to look to RSS as a possible savior for email marketing.

Aside from the fact that RSS (as implemented currently) is not as good a medium for ads. If RSS is to be successful it needs to be trackable. This means tracking clicks and impressions.

At first glance the article below seems to offer this:

IMN introduces trackable RSS

“When you open up the feed we know it. Every time you refresh the feed we count it”

Clickthroughs are simple, however, I don’t believe that IMN offer real impressions tracking. The reason is that RSS clients are like search engine crawlers that offer cached results. You don’t know whether it is an unread feed pulled by a piece of software, that registers an RSS ‘pageview’ in your stats, or a genuine pageview by a human.

Weekly Read has one of the few articles which point out that people confuse RSS and push, although it stops short of the reality.

RSS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH PUSH.

You go to a URL and pull something down. The reason why people are confused, is that when you use OTHER weblog inspired publishing methodologies in concert with RSS, such as alerting a ping server, then you can push things to a client. A ping server plus HTML and permalinks gives you much the same thing.

RSS gives you clean headlines (and on rare occasions, extra metadata) so in theory you do don’t have to scrape websites. The reality is that you do have to scrape websites (ask Google News) because the majority of RSS doesn’t contain full text for search engine indexing - but that is another story.

Jenny Levine points out that the new Yahoo search shows RSS URLs where available and has links to add sites automatically to MyYahoo.
As Jenny points out, this will drive adoption of RSS by professional news sources.

I’ve seen several comments lately about the trend away from the browser and how RSS may contribute to this, it can be used in an email client etc. But the trend for Usenet was towards the browser, with eGroups and Deja. Likewise, despite lacking in features, people seem to like Bloglines, it is a browser based RSS aggregator and my money is on this model. Bloglines doesn’t do what I want, perhaps Kinja will. My aggregator top ten wishlist items:

1. Search

2. Ability to pick a selection of blogs from a limited list of categories, not too many - prob like Google news.

3. Ability to do scoped search within these categories.

4. ‘More like this’ recommendations.

5. ‘People who linked to this blog’ button beneath selections.

6. ‘People this blog links to’ button beneath selctions (blogroll plus contextual)

7. Browseable list of blogs ranked alphabetically or by popularity or by rate of increase in popularity in addition to category lists above.

8. Ability to view other users

RSS, or more generally, web based syndication, appears to be hitting critical mass, but where is the money?

Despite the promise of metadata enriched syndicated content, RSS is usually no more than a way to syndicate a link and a headline.

No large publisher will syndicate their full content in RSS because they would lose traffic and therefore, money.

Without full content no aggregator can add much value by categorizing and filtering infomation, so no purely RSS based aggregator can make much money.

Despite all of the interest around web based syndication, people like Lexis Nexis will still make all the money unless this problem is solved.

The solution that gives publishers traffic and allows aggregators to add value is to syndicate full content in such a way that it can be searched or categorized, but people still have to go to read the article on the publisher’s site. All that is needed to do this is to remove ’stop words’ such as ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘of’ and place the tokenized remainder of the full text in the description tag.

Persuading publishers to do this would surely be the best way of focusing community efforts to guarantee the success of web based syndication, rather than concentrating on standards minutiae.

Meta-files proposed for legal music sharing

“The Content Reference Forum (CRF), founded by Universal Music Group and backed by technology companies including Microsoft, released the first specifications for the standard this week.
Using the new standard, computer users could share small files containing information about music, video or other data, but not the content itself”

Shouldn’t this be RSS? Does anyone know the people involved in CRF?

Gates trots out Longhorn:

“Among the features shown off were transparent windows, animated windows that pop open and a new taskbar on the righthand side of the screen that displayed a clock, buddy list, and news and other information streamed onto the desktop via an RSS feed.”