RSS came from the publishing industry

Last night’s conversations were incredibly interesting, the next day I’d like nothing better than to continue them. One thing I wish I had said to Om, so we could have developed the idea (or perhaps he might have disagreed) is my belief that RSS did not come from the tech industry as so many assume — it came from the publishing industry. Why? Well, the ideas in RSS are hardly technologically revolutionary. As many have pointed out, ad nauseum, CDF had some of them, and as you can see in this post from Mary Hodder, there’s no doubt something like it would have come along eventually even if we hadn’t promoted it so aggressively in the late 90s and early 00s.

The event that made the difference, that in hindsight was the tipping point for RSS, was the adoption of the format by the New York Times in 2002. The publishing industry, unlike the tech industry, didn’t feel threatened, apparently, by a thriving standard, so after the Times went first, they all just followed, compatibly, without reinventing, without gratuitous incompatiblity, without excuses, they just did it.

Now, also in hindsight, it’s pretty clear the reason it was RSS 2.0, both in the Times and in the blogging world is because I wanted it to be RSS 2.0. The Times delegated the decision to me. So I did the same thing with the Times’s content flow that I was doing with Radio’s and Manila’s and my own on Scripting News. All those things, flowing the same way, was enough to drive adoption of a de facto standard. The others in the blogging industry, which is definitely part of the tech industry, did what the tech industry always does, they tried to lock their users in through tiny little niggling incompatibilities — until Apple came along, and brazenly did what no one else dared to do. They built on the generous openness of the publishing industry, and never said thanks, and then lied about their own openness and reserved for themselves the right to decide who can read their content. And so far, they’re geting away with it.

There’s nothing in Apple’s past to suggest that it could possibly be different. They’ve never willingly let others compete with them. Bill Gates has never forgotten that they sued him over the trashcan. Only occasionally, when Jobs wasn’t there, did they flirt with the idea that competiton might be permitted.

But we don’t need the tech industry, and it’s about time their attitude reflected that. They didn’t bring us the web, that came from a researcher in academia. And they didn’t bring us RSS, that came from the publishing industry.

Why Top Ten Sources is a Good Thing

There’s been a lightly heated discussion about the Top Ten Sources site, is it a fair use of RSS, is there a copyright issue, is it a splog, is it a good idea?

The debate has focused on the negatives, and I think missed that Top Ten Sources is a send-them-away-so-they’ll-come-back site. They publish a reading list for each of the sites, containing pointers to the RSS feeds for each of the chosen source.

Mike Arrington, the superstar blogger of Web 2.0, once told me he doesn’t care how many people read his site in a web browser, what he’s looking for is subscribers to his feed. Well, if Top Ten Sources takes off, as I think it will (I’m thinking about investing), it will not only send people to your site but it will create subscribers for your feed. The fact that they publish an aggregated view of the sources is a promotional tool, they win if people subscribe to your reading list if you’re lucky enoug to be chosen as a Top Ten Source. (And in order for that to work, more aggregators have to support reading lists, as I’m sure they will.)

I hope you can see how thought-through this is. If you want more background, listen to the podcast interview I did with John Palfrey on this subject, earlier this month.

The wonderful world of Apple RSS

Here’s an example feed. You can’t read it in Firefox, and I haven’t been able to get NewsRiver to read it. They must look at the User-Agent header and only return if it’s their browser. Apparently it works with NetNewsWire. What are they doing at Apple?

Well, it’s not a User-Agent thing, it’s looking for a plugin, and it’s only present in Safari. The feed displays in Safari, but I haven’t been able to get a look at the XML source. To say this is somehow RSS is pretty wacky. Did Jobs really say it’s “industry standard,” as Engaget quotes him? I’d love to see some evidence of that.

Wait Phil Ringnalda spotted the url to the “real” feed.

http://web.mac.com/mrakes/iPhoto/photocast_test/index.rss

I couldn’t read that in my browser, so here’s a copy.

http://static2.podcatch.com/blogs/gems/snedit/rss.xml

It’s pretty bad. There are lots of errors, the date formats are wrong, there are elements that are not in RSS that aren’t in a namespace.

Engadget quoted Jobs as saying they were using “industry standard” RSS. Even if we used terminology like that (we don’t, there’s no standards body for RSS) one company can’t on its own say it’s standard, esp when it has so many mistakes in it. It’s a fairly damaging lie. Yeah, companies lie, I know — but then sometimes bloggers have to say they’re lying.

Assuming their intentions are good and they’re not trying to kill RSS, why don’t they put some of us under NDA and let us help them get the bugs out before they ship.

See Brent Simmons’s blog for more comments.

Why I’m working on an aggregator

Background

The first RSS aggregator developed at UserLand was called My.UserLand.Com. It was a centralized application, like Bloglines or My.Yahoo. It first shipped in 1999, alongside My.Netscape.Com, which took a different approach. These two web services helped bootstrap the syndication market as it exists today.

Radio 8, which shipped in early 2002, included an enhanced version the UserLand aggregator, and it quickly became the most popular way to access RSS-based information on the Internet. It’s still used by many people today, although UserLand has now focused on Manila, with my support (I’m still a major shareholder in UserLand and a member of its board of directors).

The aggregator I’m working on is a direct descendent of these two earlier aggregators. All employ the River of News presentation style, that’s why I call this aggregator newsRiver.root.

Why pick it up again?

It’s 2005 now, soon to be 2006. In the four years since Radio 8, there have been lots of aggregators, but honestly, not so many new ideas. I have a few projects I want to do, and since the OPML Editor is totally compatible with Radio, I was able to get the aggregator running here, and have begun to add new features.

My main reason for doing this work is to help bootstrap some new features in the market, specifically in two areas: Podcasting and Reading Lists. But first, I need to get a basic release out, get it running on some servers and desktops, and get feedback from users.

Licensing

UserLand will get an unrestricted license to my improvements, and may distribute the app commercially or operate it as a service for its customers; it’s entirely up to the management of the company how it wants to use this software, or if it wants to.

I am making it available to the OPML user community under the GNU Public License, as the editor itself is licensed. No need to explain what that allows. I’m hoping that everyone who’s interested in participating in a community development project around RSS aggregation will give this software a try and share their ideas.

The software runs on Windows and Mac OS X.

Timing

I plan to have a preliminary testing release available for the hale and hearty adventurers of the OPML community, later today (Murphy-willing). The docs will be sketchy. The goal will be to find out if it works, and where the most pressing needs are for fixes and docs.

Then as the software develops, I’ll make announcements on Scripting News and encourage a broader group of people to use it.

I also hope to operate a public test instance for the members of the Web 2.0 Workgroup. More on that later.