TNL.net - The personal site of Tristan Louis

RSS and Media: Can’t we all just get along?

Technology
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I keep trying to work on an entry to close the loop on the search engine and links research but RSS news is getting in the way. Last week, it was Microsoft’s welcome endorsement and a new set of extensions and this week, it’s Apple and its announcement of a new specification to add more data to RSS feeds used for podcasting. All this is nice but it seems that we’re seeing the beginning of a fairly new battle around RSS. Some History Before I go into details about Apple’s new offering, I want to give a little background that will clear up some of my confusions. I’ve been involved in the RSS community since 1999, way back when it was just the domain of geeks. Back in 2000, I made a few suggestions as to how RSS could be improved. At the same, the main version of RSS was version 0.91 and there was some interest in making a new version that would be called RSS 0.92 (yes, it was the alpha days of RSS). So five years ago, I was pushing for crazy concepts like adding a date to an item or finding ways to attach sound files…
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Goodbye and thanks for all the fish

Technology
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Big news in the RSS world as Dave Winer announces that he is leaving the RSS Advisory Board. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank him for all his hard work on this format. Back in the late 90s, when RSS was about to die a quick death after Netscape abandoned it, it was Dave that cured it back to health, realizing its potential and working hard to turn it into something that would be more significant than just presenting items on the Netscape personal page. Dave has been a controversial figure in the RSS world but without his contribution, RSS would not be what it is today. Other efforts in the syndication space have withered and died but Dave continued being the “defender of the RSS faith” and ensured that it continued evolving. Last year, in an attempt to make his own personality a non-issue in the future of RSS, he created the RSS advisory board and put RSS under a creative commons license. Like him or not, you can’t deny that Dave has been the biggest contributor to the RSS world to date. Congrats Dave on moving on and here’s to hoping that you’ll continue being involved.
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Blog Chatter

Media
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As I’ve mentioned earlier, I read a lot of feeds. By organizing them in categories, I can easily get an idea of what field is hot. For example, yesterday, upon looking at Bloglines, my RSS aggregator, I knew that something important was happening (or not, considering that it was April 1st) in the search space as the feeds I had classified as search-related seem to have more than the usual number of entry. I call this concept blog chatter. Over the past few weeks, with the 9/11 commission running its public interviews, the word chatter has come back to the forefront. Basically, it means that the noise is increasing. Thanks to the immediate or almost immediate updates given by RSS feeds, it is now possible to track what the blogosphere is talking about. Of course, this is hardly news to users of Technorati, Blogdex, Popdex, Daypop or similar services. However, one thing that is missing is a graphical representation if this chatter, similar to what Newsmap used to do. Newsfilter does an interesting job of creating instant layout based on news chatter in the Google News service but I’ve yet to see anything similar for the blog world. This is…
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Taming RSS

Technology
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2004 is obviously the year of RSS, with article popping up left and right in mainstream publications. However, RSS can also be a source of much stress, if you subscribe to too much. A few weeks ago, my list of subscribed feeds went over 300. That was the beginning of a sobering experiment. While it is technically possible to follow 300 sites via RSS, it’s not for the faint-hearted. I’ve since been pruning the list a little as it became more and more time consuming to go through all the entries. While I felt like I must be failing somehow, Sebastien Paquet pointed out that the median number of subscriptions people have is under 100. I suspect this is where the power laws actually become useful. Because some blogs are disproportionally read, they can be seen as flag-bearers in the blogosphere. Because they are so powerful, they can easily shape opinions in the blog world. And because they do so, one can limit the number of blogs they read in order to get an idea as to consensus among blogsters. This is great in that those powerful bloggers become editors of sorts. There is, however, a problem with that. As…
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Traffic Stats and RSS

Technology
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An interesting thing happened recently. I was playing around with Andrew Grumet’s tool based on the information in Share Your OPML and discovered that a number of people still subscribe to old feeds. This has direct impact on what stats can look like. While I do receive a fair amount of traffic on the RSS feeds (collectively, about 60,000 requests a day), it is hard to know which ones are new requests vs. which ones are regular subscribers. Going beyond that, it is also hard to know whether someone actually reads the stuff. HTML email allows for this kind of tracking but RSS is not mature enough to provide rich data that could be of use to marketers or stats fans like myself. While the subscription to category feeds gives me an idea as to what people are interested in (and shows how few people are interested in my personal life, confirming a deep-seated suspicion that I’m as boring in the virtual world as I am in the real one 🙂 ), it is hard to know whether people subscribed, read, or clicked on links. I guess I could set up some tracking info to trap that information but I’m…
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The case for Elert

Technology
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A few weeks ago, Amy Gahran, of contentious.com, started a contest to find a new nickname for RSS. I submitted Elert as my entry. Today, I found that it’s one of the top entries in terms of votes but I need help getting it to the top. This is where you, gently readers, come in. Please vote for Elert! Here’s why I chose this particular name as my entry: First of all it is short. By comparison, people talk about the “web” instead of the “world wide web” so any nickname needs to just roll off the tongue. Second, it has to represent the concept: When I get a tip from an RSS feed, what am I getting? First, I’m getting a reminder that something new has been posted. In some cases, it’s a portion of an entry, in others, it’s the whole entry. In either case, I am alerted to the fact that new content has been posted. This alert comes electronically, hence the replacement of a single letter to form the new elert term. An elert is an electronic alert. Why no web mention? Well, I thought of that one for a while, as the term web has…
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From David to Dave

Politics, Technology
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The New York Times has an interesting article over a fight about how to best clean Michelangelo’s David. It’s an interesting study of how technology sometimes clashes with more traditionalist approaches. In our rush to use technology for everything, it is interesting to stop and ponder whether it is the right tool for the job. Often, geeks like myself tend to jump on technology for technology’s sake. An example of this is the recent hubbub over (n)echo, which has left many people wondering whether RSS is broken. The truth is that it isn’t and that whatever new format comes up will live nicely in parallel to RSS for years to come. When estimating technology, one should ask himself/herself whether it is the right tool for the job. I could write a calculator program to calculate the sum of one and one but that does not mean that I should (especially on such a small thing). So why is it that we get so blinded by technology? Why is it that the old axiom “to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail” holds true so often when it comes to technology projects? Part of it is what I would…
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