The more transparent, the easier to abuse. In UNIX, everything is a file. It is a useful abstraction, but we've all grown out of that.

If everything is XML - it is a useful abstraction, but we'll all grow out of that. If everyting is RSS, it is a useful abstraction, but we'll all grow out of that.

Apple had a technology called "Publish and Subscribe" that was implemented great but never quite caught on. Portals, active desktop, whatever, all - not only is it an issue of making it easy to subscribe to the content, but also of making the content easy to find, organize, and utilize.

As a content company, MS can not be expected to play fair in terms of allowing people to easily get to whatever content they want. In the same way that, as an application vendor, MS as an OS company did not play fair in terms of allowing people to easily get whatever application they wanted. How did they "not play fair"? (Yes, I might be stretching the use of that phrase quite a bit.) The initial default.

So many people will use something just because it comes with the machine/OS. If MS adopts RSS heavily, it means that everyone and more will have to worry about coding around any bugs in their RSS parser. It means that whatever feeds are included by default will automatically be assured high traffic by default. I wouldn't put it past them to make the retrival and rendering of feeds that they don't control to be a slight bit slower.

The semanticization is, IMHO, the key difference between RSS/XML/Atom and HTML. This is why, arguably, things have gotten more complex: in the old days, one HTML file might be formatted perfectly. Now-a-days, one needs an XHTML file, and usually a CSS file, and probably a javascript file, and for the feed readers a feed file. There are hacks to get them all into less files, but they're just hacks. This is complication. Semanticization necessarily breeds complication. Semanticization is key to machine comprehension which is the basis for Web 2.0.

And complication yields organization problems. For the most part, the consequence will be technology that develops at a rate faster than technology adoption, because semanticization facilitates technology development but not technology adoption. The only ones that can push technology adoption at will on their own are those with really large audiences, and so while MS may have a semanticized core, the technologies that will be laden atop them will be MS-specific and given great market push by MS.

I don't see anything changing. They've just figured out where on the middlewhere chain they can jump to to fight the next platform war.

Sorry, just a little rant here. Feel free to disregard. That's enough of this break for me, back to work.

Actually Currys pitch has just come up my Shuffle again and I think I will listen again - better than Steve Jobs speach as word perfect (MS joke) as it was.

So yeah anyway - lets chat this week - here's what i blogged thanks for the plug : htp://benbarren.blogspot.com - Ill call this week ?

Just listened to the Microsoft RSS podcast from Gnomedex and Adam Curry closing speech both of which Iíd highly recommend.

Hereís a direct quote from Brad Chase, once of Microsoft at the launch of IE4 back in the day (at Gnomedex they were previewing IE 7)

Active Desktop was a pre-cursor to RSS - or a previous attempt at ëpushí media : The difference today is the focus on consumers being able to ísubscribeí to their favourite sites, who themselves will ensure their site is formatted in the right RSS (or Microsoft ?) format to ensure subscription can occur seamlessly. Active Channels had a handful of ëprofessionalí content sites (to quote Steve Jobs on ëprofessionalí podcasters)

Curry made an impassioned plea to let consumers ëget their media backí and also pushed that all industry players should be pushing for one click subscription. Iíd recommend his talk over Steve Jobs ëStay Foolish Stay Hungryí any day - His ëevery user is a developer, and every developer is a userí is on the money at this juncture of RSS.

From Brad Chase @ IE4 launch many years ago : Microsoft is focused on ìa newer way of getting information, some people call it push, we call it sometimes Webcasting. Itís the ability to have Web sites delivered to you. So not only do we think primarily people want to browse, but we also believe thereís a set of people that want content to come to them. I know that I travel a lot, for example. And so itís really convenient for me to be able to take a set of sites, download them onto my notebook and browse them right on the plane, even though Iím not connected.î

Bill Gates said at the same launch ìCertainly, we believe weíve made a lot of progress in the browser space. One thing we feel is that with this product, Internet Explorer 4.0, during its lifetime, we will go to over 50 percent market share of browser users. So IE 4 is a major event. Dynamic HTML, active channels, the mail client weíve got here, the advances in Net Meeting, all of those are based on the feedback from the people who are out there using the Web in very interesting ways.î

Itís almost Ten Years on ! Who will have the last laugh ? and where is Rupert ?

http://benbarren.blogspot.com