I wanted to send an email to Jon after having watched the webcast of his aggregators session at BloggerCon but unfortunately can’t find it.

In the presentation Jon said that RSS was one possible step towards solving the problems in email, something that was perhaps worth $1Bn.
I am personally interested in being the proud owner of a billion dollars, so was paying attention.

Since the question I wanted to ask via email was on the very topic of how RSS really offers something different than email then if Jon reads this through his subscription to this weblog, then perhaps this will illustrate the point.

The problem is this: the email channel is too noisy for people like newsletter publishers to use.

Assuming for a moment that RSS readers are commonplace in email clients. For pure opt-in Newsletters then RSS works, (Jon is subscribed to this weblog, so he has opted in to read this - and even if he doesn’t really read my weblog, perhaps the mention of his name in the headline will help and because it is RSS the mention of Viagra and huge amounts of cash won’t matter). For pure opt-in, email works much like RSS - someone could whitelist my email address in much the same way that they may subscribe to my weblog. Not everyone uses whitelist filters, but even less people have RSS readers. The problem can be solved technically by both, but RSS would actually need more people to start using new software.

A more interesting problem is unsolicited information. This need not all be pernicious - I would hope this email to Jon wouldn’t be considered as such, and I would assume that suggested RSS feeds for weblogs based upon a personal profile would also be OK. But if the channel is open for suggested feeds then how does this avoid the spam problem.

In short, I am missing something, sorry two things, I forgot the $1Billion.

Libby Miller has an excellent piece on strategies for combining foaf and geo with RDFical.

Plan B: Combining foaf, RDFical and geo, and maybe RSS 1.0…

0xDECAFBAD has a very nice example of RSS 2.0 and RSS-Data alongside.

If you use schemas with RSS, you get eveything that RSS-Data provides and more to the point, you make the data structure definitions optional.

The only downside as far as I can see is that with RSS-Data the structural definitions are inline.

Surely, however, since schemas are in XML themselves they can be inline - rather like CSS being inline or referenced?

Jeremy Allaire is having some interesting ideas about RSS.

I like his idea of RSS-Data, but isn’t the idea of a generic aggregator separate?

Rich metadata in RSS isn’t happening at the moment, the spec is there but the tools to create and read the content aren’t:

1. there are no end user tools to create modules (why not allow people to build their own forms, where each form field is an RSS tag in a namespace that is their email address by defaut?)

2. there are no aggregators that read extended metadata (there are no aggregators that filter by a MoveableType category, for example).

Both these issues are as much to do with UI as data modelling. RSS module builders could use a web forms that build forms approach, (the ‘metacrap’ syndrome would be a problem but there are hundreds of person-years work that have already gone into this with EDI standards such as EDIFACT (I had a go at this a few years back, with a proposal for the fields in webforms)). An RSS meta-aggregator would have to allow users to preselect which new autodiscovered metadata to display in order to avoid innevitable UI issues such as sparse columns etc. In fact the best interim hack for this would be a Excel import tool that read RSS modules on the fly.

Current RSS readers are more or less similar, differentiated on interface features rather than core functionality, and sold, where applicable as software tools.

Over time these features will surely be a commodity and any business model around RSS aggregation will be based upon the value add on top of aggregation.

My guess is that this value-add is in efficient searching, categorizing and personalizing rather than discovery and display.

Categorization and personalization can be done by adding metadata to existing feeds (the tokenization process of search could arguably be considered metadata a tokenized content tag would allow local searching). This can be entirely independent of the tool used to view RSS, providing that RSS readers can read this metadata.

The time is probably about right to start looking at this from the various initiatives such as FOAF and RSS topics that are out there and building features based upon them into aggregators.

Nick Bradbury’sFeedDemon is very nice.

The 3 pane interface is clearly the way to go for RSS reading.

What’s really interesting about FeedDemon however, is that it is basically an RSS enhanced browser rather than a separate app. admittedly the distinction is blurred, but seeing FeedDemon does lead me to believe that RSS features could become standard, collapsible components of a browser.

When the joint Moreover/Blogger tool Newsblogger launched, it had a similar 3 pane view, but was definitely an online app. Blogger then decided to make it function through an Explorer bar in IE, which is more similar to the path that FeedDemon is going down.

There are four types of aggregator: online (Bloglines); separate app (Newzcrawler, Newsmonster, Amphetadesk; Netnewswire); enhanced browser (FeedDemon); and enhanced email app (Newsgator).

Until now, I was convinced that the online approach was best, but I’m not so sure.

If you fill in a form to create a weblog post that has a permalink then you are creating something that is RDF-like by nature.

Subject = the Post itself, which is pointed to by a permalink.
Predicate = the label of any field that you have to fill in.
Object = whatever you type in the field.

The RDF/XML syntax can be hard - but the model is not, and no matter what the disputes surrounding its use are, weblog posts are an almost perfect application of some of the most important ideas behind RDF.

An RDF statement is like a form field and its label (e.g. name: david) that are a property and value of something unique, like a person. Conveniently, if there is a URL that is that something, or is the identifier for that something then the properties pertain to that URL.

When people post weblog entries, they often attach a unique url to that entry via a permalink. The weblog post, unlike a webpage, which can be a temporary rendering of the output from a database, is an item which contains meaning. Information is being published and retrieved in chunks where meaning, semantics, are being created or stored.

The fact that weblog publishing arrived here via a separate route surely validates some of the principal ideas of RDF, even if there is some debate about the specifics.

Ebay is a site that is full of links to trademarked names - things for sale like ‘Nikes’. It is threatening to sue Google advertisers who use the name Ebay in phrases like ‘Ebay power seller’. One advertiser puts it in perspective: “How do you say that you repair Volkswagens without saying Volkswagen?”.

Ebay doesn’t have an API, is hostile to third party add-on software and has bought third party products like Paypal that encroached on its value-add and commissions. If Ebay, which has a virtual monopoly on classifieds is so hostile to decentralization, perhaps Ebay is vulnerable to the syndication model?

Google ads a threat to eBay trademark? | CNET News.com

“If you believe in human-readability of your markup and in the power of XML, and your website isn’t valid XHTML, you’re contradicting yourself.”

Refined RSS feeds (kottke.org)

I’d damn well better shut up then. Although I do have a super lovely Typepad (machine) created XHTML blog in the works.

I still think that RSS can be both human readable and match its potential, its not to do with namespaces or the RDF model, but the fact that the RDF syntax shoehorns into XML in a way that there are double statements that read like legalese.

CareerBuilder, which is a joint venture by newspapers, outbid a $25 million per annum deal, struck at the peak of the dotcom bubble, between Monster and AOL, where the jobs service pays the portal for exclusivity. The reason:

“newspapers’ jobs classified ad revenue, which dropped by half from $8.7 billion in 2000, to $4.3 billion in 2002″.

Imagine if the entire classified ad business not only went online but decentralized and was based around RSS syndication and aggregation?

Newspapers: Help wanted in Net ad battle | CNET News.com