RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary, depending on who you listen to. Either way RSS has become the poster child for the Publish-Subscribe protocol. RSS allows weblog and website owners to syndicate their content to anyone who wishes to subscribe to it. Usually people subscribe to "RSS feeds" via an aggregator. Some weblog authoring tools also support RSS subscriptions - for example Radio Userland.
The weblog community has embraced RSS. Most bloggers have RSS feeds now - even design guru Jeffrey Zeldman has signed up (and immediately defended himself against accusations that he had "sold out"!). With RSS there is less control over design - it is enough work designing for different browsers, without having to cater to multiple aggregators too! Text is primary with RSS, which I believe brings ideas to the fore.
RSS currently is used to syndicate personal content or news items. But there is another value in RSS, which is beginning to be explored more - using RSS as a means to subscribe to content by topic. RSS topic subscriptions bring us closer to the Semantic Web - defined by Tim Berners-Lee as "an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning". Subscribing to an RSS topic feed lets a web user accurately and automatically gather information that has specific meaning to them.
Most RSS feeds currently are personal weblog and news items - which means the publisher controls the content. RSS feeds that are based on topics on the other hand, give power back to the subscriber. As an example, recently I subscribed to the BBC top stories RSS feed. But there are only a few topics I'm interested in from BCC - news on the Iraq war, British football, any technology stories that come up. I found though that a lot of the content was local British news, which I have little use for since I come from New Zealand. Eventually I unsubscribed from the BBC news feed, because there was too much content that was irrelevant to me. But wouldn't it be great if I could subscribe to only the news items from the BBC that matched the topics I specified? I could enter "Premier league football" as a topic, or I could even narrow it down to my favourite team "Manchester United".
I would like to be able to subscribe to information that currently interests me. For example I am interested in the "two-way web". I can subscribe to personal weblogs that I know will discuss that topic from time to time. But how much more efficient to simply enter the phrase "two-way web" into my RSS aggregator and have it scour the Web, finding and delivering articles about the two-way web. It would be like entering a search into Google - but because this is RSS it is an ongoing, automated delivery of information to me.
There is also an increased chance that I will find more gold nugget articles, by writers I've never heard of. RSS topic feeds may go some way to addressing the A-List blogger problem, whereby a small percentage of bloggers get a disproportionately large amount of hits. This is due to what's called a power law in network theory - a few hubs in a network are immensely more popular than the majority of hubs. Power laws in fact define many things such as the movie industry and the music scene. The World Wide Web itself is a prime example of a power law in motion. A tiny number of "hubs" like Google and Yahoo get a vast number of visits every day. But the Web is made up of millions of pages, most of which are hardly ever visited. (ps check out this Google search query for an ironic example of power laws on the Web - webloggers are the top 3 search results!).
RSS topic feeds will still more likely pick up items from popular bloggers, but at least there is a chance the rest of us will have an article or two "subscribed" to via a topic request.
I want to finish by mentioning a couple of interesting projects that are moving us closer towards a topic subscription model for RSS.
One such project is ENT - which stands for "Easy News Topics". ENT is a module of RSS2.0 and the goal is to "enable a new generation of aggregator applications to be written. These aggregators will allow people to filter items they do not wish to see, prioritize those about things they are interested in and recombine items into new feeds." ENT relies on RSS publishers entering new tag data, in particular the tags 'cloud' (a URI source which describes the topics) and 'topic' (a "metadata item"). There are issues with this "self-categorization" - reliability of data, differences in how people interpret words and phrases, etc. However one of the ENT authors Matt Mowers responded by saying that "ENT could just as easily be used by a categorizer bot that sucked in feeds and annotated them (using heuristics) with topics from it's own cloud." This is an intriguing idea - an automated Yahoo of the RSS world?
Another new RSS app that gathers information by topic instead of author, is Gnews2RSS at VoidStar.com. This application creates RSS feeds on-the-fly for Google news items. You simply enter a topic into a search box, then click the "Create RSS" button. An instant RSS feed is displayed, allowing you to subscribe to it on an ongoing basis using your favourite RSS aggregator.
RSS subscriptions by topics is a step towards the Semantic Web. It gives more customization control to web users and allows all writers to reach a wider audience.
I discovered today a site called WriteTheWeb, which is "a community news site dedicated to encouraging the development of the read/write web". Like me they believe the Read/Write Web "doesn't just mean writing words, it means any time the web experience becomes two-way." This is an important point, because a lot of people have no desire to publish writing on the web. I'm only interested in it because I enjoy reading and writing, and I love web technology - so writing to the web is the best of both worlds for me! But the Read/Write Web is also about interacting with websites and applications. It's a two-way communication where information and transactions are personalized, or at least able to be customized.
The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfil the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it. The web was never just supposed to be a one-way publishing system, but the first decade of the web has been dominated by a tool which has been read-only - the web browser. The goal now is to convert the web into a two-way system. Ordinary people should be able to write to the web, just as easily as they can browse and read it.
In 2001 Dave Winer built a website called The Two Way Web, which articulates a vision of publishing where the "content and the editing environment (are) totally integrated". My vision of the "Read/Write Web" is similar, but I like the read/write metaphor for a couple of reasons. Firstly I like to read books and I enjoy the art of writing. The other reason is that read/write as applied to the computer industry tradionally means "capable of being displayed (read) and modified (written to)". For example a floppy disk drive. So the term "read/write" cuts across both computing and journalism/literature.
In the early 90's Tim Berners-Lee envisaged an editable browser that would not only allow people to surf the web, but to modify it. First Mosiac, then Netscape, then Microsoft all produced web browsers that accomplished the browsing part - but did not allow editing. The browser manufacturers also made it difficult for people to publish to the web because each browser had its own web standards, which were incompatible with each other.
If a non-technical person wanted to publish to the web in the 90's, they had to use a separate tool to the browser - such as Microsoft Frontpage. Then there was a technical learning curve to overcome. OK so HTML isn't hard to learn, but throw in curveballs such as conflicting browsers, quirky webpage creation tools (Frontpage webbots anyone?) and competing usability ideologies being preached by the likes of Jakob Nielson and David Siegel. You begin to see that "writing" to the web wasn't as easy as it could have been, and certainly fell short of what Tim Berners-Lee envisaged.
It has only been in the past couple of years, with the advent of weblogs, that an easy method of publishing to the web has become available. Products like Radio Userland, Movable Type and Blogger help people set up a web presence by giving them templates to enter their content into and a simple "point and click" method of publishing it. With weblogs, ordinary people now have the opportunity to contribute their thoughts and opinions to the World Wide Web, in conjuntion with browsing the web. We are approaching a read/write web.
The Read/Write Web isn't just about being able to publish writing though, it is also about an increased ability for ordinary people to interact and transact with websites. For example most corporate websites used to be brochureware sites. Information the company presented on their website was one-dimensional and similar to a printed brochure. In the past few years, company websites have evolved so that users can interact with the site and (the next step up) transact with it. For example, on my telephone company's website I can now view the details of my telephone bill and request a new phone line via an online form. This is another example of being able to "write" to the web - my online relationship with my phone company is two-way.
The Read-Write Web is being enhanced by new XML technologies such as RSS. I can subscribe to various RSS "feeds" from my favourite weblogs like Dave Winer's Scripting News and Jon Udell's Radio. This is what is called "Publish/Subscribe" - Dave and Jon publish their content via an RSS feed, and I subscribe to it via a news aggregator such as Feedreader. There are many other XML technologies that promote the Read-Write Web - such as content management systems, RDF, IM, OPML. I will explore these in more detail in future articles on my weblog.
The Read/Write Web means that ordinary people can now easily publish their 2 cents to the World Wide Web. A corollary of this is increased sources of information to read on the web. Previously people got their news and information from sources such as newspapers and magazines. Now people can get their information 'straight from the horses mouth', in addition to traditional media. The Read/Write Web encourages people to broadcast their specialist knowledge so that anyone can tune into it - witness the recent popularity of lawyer and librarian weblogs.
The web is now much like the CD Writer found in most modern computer desktop packages. It can be browsed and read, plus written and recorded to. With weblogs and other XML technologies, we can easily publish information to the web and interact with other websites. The Read/Write Web is the next generation of web publishing, and we're in the middle of creating it!
