Scobleizer - Latest Comments in The anti-RSS hype

Re: The anti-RSS hype

Roger Kondrat — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 15:42:29 -0000

hmmm, wow there is a lot of interest in RSS on Scobe's site. I was just at @Media London last week and lots of people were talking about it there too. That tells me there is lots of interest and perhaps lots of potential too.

I don't want to be too confrontation but for me RSS is a means to an end. RSS will help move data more efficiently. It already does that for Winer, Scoble, Michael(techcrunch), etc. But these guys are techs so they are willing to utilise a service with rough edges the public doesn't.

So as I see we have a great protocol with amazing potential but how it is being used today is probably nothing like what it will be in 5yrs when it is truely mainstream.

Scoble makes a good point in his post about the Mac and UNIX. Today RSS is UNIX efficient but not friendly, tomorrow though RSS could be the new Mac OSX.

Only time will tell but I have faith, we have only scratched the surface of RSS's potential in my opinion.

Re: The anti-RSS hype

Loek — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 01:42:17 -0000

Generally speaking I like Slashdot to see what is happening in Geek town (no offense!), but to me it always appears as though the people there dislike anything that gets attention or that has the potential to become mainstream, heck, even popular. See the example of the iPod which was called "lame" on Slashdot. To me the crowd there appears like those guys that stop listening to bands they liked before but that now became popular or that have been played on the radio ("damn, they have become commercial, they lost their credibility!"). Nothing wrong with that, but please regard Slashdot's discussion within the right context.

Re: The anti-RSS hype

Christopher Coulter — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 15:28:54 -0000

It’s pretty obvious you’ve never even tried reading the ones I’m currently subscribed to

Wanta bet? I have nearly all (and more) in my 1,500 one, tho you thankfully purged Jason's network (another redudant posting gig). And my defintion of redudant is quite differing than yours obviously. Thankfully it's a free world and I get to choose, not having you as my gatekeeper. Heck, even you praise Gabe's toolset to high heaven, when it just algo's the main topics from the main personalities, with overlap-tracking as a FEATURE, and all from the same perspective and without much in the way of real reporting. That to me is redudant.

Read 743 websites in a browser? Yes, easy. Tons of PR/News Culling toolsets out there, you know. Get beyond your limited bloggeristic view. Cymfony Dashboard for one. Problem here it be not grassroots, rather limited to the professional market, as such be where demand lies. But thinking there is no solution, only shows your glaring ignorance of this market.

Re: The anti-RSS hype

solomonrex — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 13:08:19 -0000

Look, RSS is a format, not a device. No one REALLY cares about DVDs. They care about movies on the consumer side, or about making money on the hardware/software/hollywood side. So no one cares about RSS. That Scoble is addicted to an RSS reader is no surprise, but I think it has something to do with MS making fat clients.

Honestly, I hate fat clients. I'd rather have Yahoo Mail than Outlook, but my company sees thing differently - for now. Someday they won't. And I'll be glad. So I'm never using a fat reader. I think there's something to be said for focusing on fewer lines of thought. I can't imagine what use Scoble has for hundreds of potential voices crying for his attention, when he already has a website with hundreds of voices trying to talk to him. The RSS/blogs development is a fad format. It's useful in rare circumstances, like Scoble's and some journalists. Look at Channel9 - it exists. So RSS is not enough. Fat RSS Readers are not adequate, and aren't a huge improvement over IE.

In other words, I think it's keen that I can view headlines from CNN, ESPN, Autoblog, etc. without visiting their website. But they shouldn't. And Consumers aren't all that excited about it. If Engadget and Autoblog had a normal front page with headlines and small captions like ESPN, I wouldn't really need that much of a feed. AND they'd make more money.

They real application will eventually be push video. An instance where a website would get in the way, where headlines are adequate, where marking what you've seen is vital. On the other hand, we already have this, and it's called Tivo.

I guess RSS Readers are Tivo for weboholics.

Re: The anti-RSS hype

addicteed — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 09:11:44 -0000

I have trouble keeping up with news even with my RSS subscriptions, I've no idea what I would do without them.

Re: The anti-RSS hype

Jernej — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 07:40:54 -0000

#46 "The news stand is still checked everyday, its just someone else doing it for you."

Likewise the aggregator checks and delivers content to me. How's that any different?

Whatever the difference (details), how does it matter to the end user? My brother (and almost everyone else) doesn't give a .... how these things work. The end user is a passive recipient not actively searching and that's what matters. It's easier and saves time even if you're only subscribed to a single feed.

Re: The anti-RSS hype

Matthias — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 06:42:32 -0000

The Slashdot crowd only finds this study three months after it was published? Amazing.

Re: The anti-RSS hype

ceedee — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 03:14:22 -0000

I've recently switched from Bloglines to NetVibes [http://www.netvibes.com/] -- kind of like a more flexible Personal Google 'desktop' (eg. collapsing sections). But it feels clunky! It desperately needs a more flexible gui. And more 'modules' (widgets, to anyone else).
I find it an easier way of handling 25-odd, low-volume, web/tech feeds a couple of times each day than Bloglines.

My high-volume news and "must-know-now" feeds stick on my igoogle desktop (again, an inflexible, cruddy layout) -- alongside an ever-increasing stack of useful tools.

And it's suddenly occured to me that I might be able to do the same thing on a ProtoPage...
Wondeful times! :)

Re: The anti-RSS hype

scobleizer — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 02:53:37 -0000

Christopher: the blogs I read are not redundant. It's pretty obvious you've never even tried reading the ones I'm currently subscribed to. If they get redundant more than once in a while I unsubscribe.

Hey, if you like using the browser more than a news aggregator, great. For me, though, I've found it's about 10x more productive to read things in an aggregator.

Re: The anti-RSS hype

Christopher Coulter — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 02:44:04 -0000

Sigh. More Medium is the Message rot talk, same ole tired script. Like a lower top-40 hit song played over and over, until you are sick of it. And 743 Web sites? No, rather maybe 40 websites, and 703 (mostly redudant) blogs.

Re: The anti-RSS hype

ruturajv — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 00:52:24 -0000

"Yahoo and Ipsos did that found only 4% of users are using RSS"

Let us shutdown the all RSS feeds for a day and see how many Websites are down / inadequate / useless.

Re: The anti-RSS hype

Larry Borsato — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 23:38:31 -0000

Zorm, RSS is not a protocol per se, but machine readable metadata. In my case it is about one quarter of the size of my web page.

Yes RSS can potentially lead to more hammering on your server, but it can also reduce the load because I can see the headlines at a glance and read only what interests me. You can also provide partial feeds to cut the load further (though you will make Robert unhappy).

RSS can potentially lead to better we searching given that the metadata would be searchable versus current web pages that are basically blobs of unstructured text.

Also in the future we may move from a pull mechanism to a push mechanism, whereby we only push changes to those who are subscribed. Amazingly, RSS as it exists today would still work in that situation.

RSS is not perfect, but it is a shot in the right direction.

Re: The anti-RSS hype

Larry Borsato — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 23:22:06 -0000

We keep thinking of RSS as a way to read web pages efficiently, which it is, but that won't make the average person use it. In fact, the average person probably shouldn't even care what RSS is, but they should see the benefits of it.

I think of RSS as the news crawl on the bottom of the screen on CNN, only when a topic interests me I can click and find out more. Or a stock ticker that shows me the current price of my stock. Or the headlines on my newspaper.

RSS is already on the way to solving other problems. Technology really becomes useful when it is so well integrated into our daily like that we don't even notice it. A couple of years ago a survey might have shown that less than 4% of people used DVD players or iPods. Clearly things change.

Re: The anti-RSS hype

Zorm — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 23:16:30 -0000

RSS isn't really a solution to anything. Its just another format for serving data similar to HTML.

For the guy talking about refreshing slashdot all the time, what do you think your RSS reader is doing? In fact it likely ends up using more because its going to refresh even if you wouldn't because you got distracted or such.

The magazine example is similarly flawed. The news stand is still checked everyday, its just someone else doing it for you. If you are going to teach/give examples they might as well as be correct.

The problem with RSS is the fact that you are still hammering the server to get the information, I suspect if RSS grows that the servers will end up taking on increased load and suffering because of it.

The real solution will have to come from some new protocol. However, this will be hard as it likely won't be standardized and things like firewalls/routers won't play nicely.

Re: The anti-RSS hype

Bryan Price — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 22:48:04 -0000

Well, by my count, it's currently 780 public blogs according to http://www.bloglines.com/pu...

Evidently I'm strange. Of course, I tried aggregate reades a few years before. On dial up, it really sucked, as all of a sudden, page loads would start crawling, because the aggregator decided to grab all of the updates, and proceeded to suck all my available bandwidth away from me.

Which is probably one reason why I'm really hooked on Bloglines, and web-based aggregators. I'm not sucking all that bandwidth through my system. Updates that I don't care about, not my bandwidth/problem.

Re: The anti-RSS hype

Gui Ambros — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 22:24:31 -0000

I totally agree with scoble on this, but for different reasons.

Instead of reducing the RSS to a simple "news aggregator" that allows some freak geek to catch up daily with 743 websites (sorry scoble! ;o)), i goes exacly in the opposite direction. I don't see RSS as a one-to-many channel, but instead my bet goes to a massive-one-to-one delivery of personalized messages.

The message itself could be anything: a feed with personalized recommendations from Amazon, information from his baking account and credit card charges, vehicle maintenance information from his car maker, information extracted from Yahoo Finance with his personal stocks. And, obviously, the good and old plain static content too.

All these fancy functionalities are currently available from our banks, car markers or favorite bookstores, but the problem is that they all come in different shapes, sizes, colors, forms, frequencies, and usually behind clumsy usernames and passwords. But this is not what the average user wants in the long term. He wants to be able to consolidate everything in a portable manner, accessible through multiple devices and with a consistent interface.

This is exacly where the RSS fits is and allows users to have a single platform to receive all types of messages, and - here's the best part! - everything under an *open* platform, not tied to a specififc proprietary tool, specific vendors or pre-determined devices.

In the end of the day, it's not about THE SITE delivering content; it's about THE USER receiving the information he/she wants.

I see a great road for rss. Maybe not in 2006, but certainly in the upcoming years. And I hope by then to be making fun of those who said that having 743 feeds is non-sense... lol.

Re: The anti-RSS hype

Bill Nadraszky — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 22:14:36 -0000

743 feeds is a lot of stuff to read sure. I personally read around 250 and lets remember that most people do not update daily while some update five times a day.

To commenter number one, yes many people do only read two or three feeds a day but perhaps they should look bigger. Before RSS feeds I used to read 10-15 newspapers omline, now I still read that many but I also read a couple hundred other "news" sources and I am sure not alone.

anyone that has found a list by way of OPML or otherwise will agree that it is much better to have too many feeds and just look at the ones that interest them on a daily basis than be out of the loop not knowing what is current in the feild that you are interested in whether it be news or just opinion

Re: The anti-RSS hype

Gary Petersen — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 21:49:30 -0000

Only 743? I guess you really did trim your feed list! :-)

Re: The anti-RSS hype

sundoggy — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 20:44:46 -0000

I have read /. for a long time (not to mentioned subscribed to their RSS feed, heh heh), and until this article (and a lot of the comments) never realized what a bunch of old school un-visionaries hang out there. There is a pervasive no-business sense attitude throughout the comment thread. The fact that 27% of users actually do use it (it doesn't matter at the end of the day whether the users know what the underlying technology is) validates its potential straight away. It's funny though, despite most of the commenters in that article being RSS naysayers, there are a ton of good business ideas spinkled throughout, and I think that's where RSS will really make its impact as an aggregate (no pun intended) technology used in conjunction with many other applicaitons (podcasting is probably the best example of this today).

Re: The anti-RSS hype

Piyush — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 19:53:44 -0000

The question is do you really want blog updates to be *pushed* to you? I for one dont think so. Following blogs or news feeds does not rank at the same level as receiving e-mail notifications for instance. At least not for me. Even though I follow several blogs, when I have time and inclination I prefer to visit couple of blogs that I actually feel like reading at that time. Using an RSS reader adds to my information overload. And this is pretty much the sentiment echoed among the Slashdots comments as well.

Re: The anti-RSS hype

Duncan — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 19:44:36 -0000

Actually, just spent some more time reading your post and the Slashdot/ Yahoo piece: Microsoft should buy you some glasses Robert because the report says only 4% of people are aware they are using RSS but 27% of people use it, or as they call is "an unaware RSS user". Try reading the report.

Re: The anti-RSS hype

Duncan — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 19:03:25 -0000

And imagine how much more quicker it would be for you to skim them all if they were all partial feeds!

Re: The anti-RSS hype

DrumsNWhistles — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 18:35:23 -0000

Interesting topic. One of my early 2006 tasks is to educate a group of people at work and my family about RSS, why feeds work, how to set them up and use them.

It took me about a weekend to figure it out and I had to try every available aggregator on the Net before finally settling on Bloglines. I've been working on trying to write out procedures as well as a document explaining RSS. The magazine/newspaper subscription analogy works to a point, but it's not going to be clear enough for some of them who are just now acclimated to email.

I love RSS. It reminds me of the old Compuserve days when I'd send my forum reader out to pick up my messages from all of the forums I participated in or moderated so that I could read, answer and otherwise deal with them offline to save the connection charges. Now it's not about connection charges, obviously, but it is still about time. It's just faster to load them all up in the browser and scan though everything in one place.

BUT, what I hate is the acronym that no one understands and the terminology. It's much easier to explain "click the 'add to My Yahoo! icon" than it is to explain what a feed is, what an aggregator is, and that it isn't limited to the major sites...that's a chore!

Re: The anti-RSS hype

Jeremiah Owyang — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 18:31:13 -0000

It will be interesting to see if users continue to use tools like bloglines, and other indexers,

I got a chance to check out the new MS Outlook, it has feeds build right in. that's another example that RSS is going mainstream.

I wonder if feedreaders will be embedded in regular desktop applications, that it will be seamless.

Re: The anti-RSS hype

Jeremiah Owyang — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 18:23:52 -0000

Gray-

Regardless of the content that the RSS points to (sometimes RSS is just a 'wrapper') it could include anytype of content it points to from podcasts, images, text, links, videos, or whatever's next

I describe RSS as a Medium. (like email, websites, or even a newspaper)