An Ode to RSS, On RSS Awareness Day
There's just a few hours left in what should be an international holiday - RSS Awareness Day. Thought up by the good folks at DailyBlogTips.com and unknown until this morning to even RSS forefather Dave Winer, RSS Awareness Day is a fantastic idea. May 1st is a lot of things already but what the heck, let's pile another one on. We'd like to take a few minutes to reflect on the world-changing tool that RSS is, and consider how different our lives would be without it.
If this is all new to you, start with the now classic short animation embedded below - called RSS in Plain English.
I hope that those of you who know and love RSS already enjoyed watching that video again. Big thanks to Common Craft for doing such work, it was no surprise that they were later contracted by Google to make product launch videos for them as well.
Now, let's consider how different a place the world is because of RSS. Some of this is said in a spirit of fun, some of it is very serious.
Without RSS, The Blogosphere Would Die
If no one read your blog, you'd probably not write on it very often. At least for many, many bloggers it's the knowledge that there are people reading that motivates them to write consistently and to write as well as they (we) can. Imagine having to visit every blog you were interested in by entering the URL manually and checking to see if there were new articles posted. If that was the only option, blog readership would plummet and the number of blogs actively published would wither.
RSS allows casual readers to become ongoing subscribers, easily receiving new articles in a convenient way when they are available. A world without RSS (or, of course some other simple syndication protocol) would be a very bad world for blogs. A world without blogs would be...well, I'll let you make your own judgement call about that. Thanks for reading and subscribing to this blog though!
RSS Brings Podcasts to Life
By the same logic, without RSS it would hardly be viable to publish a podcast. That may be even more true about podcasts than it is about blogs. RSS subscription is the only thing separating podcasts from total obscurity. You can't tell that to all the millions of dogs around the world that get walked while their people listen to podcasts though. For those dogs, RSS is a miracle.
What are your favorite podcasts? Mine are the Gillmor Gang, IT Conversations and Democracy Now. If you like listening to podcasts - ask yourself, would you want to go to each show's website, see if there's a new episode available and then download it each time you wanted to listen to a podcast? No, you wouldn't.
If any of my favorite podcasts went off the air, I'd suffer serious emotional and occupational distress. If it weren't for RSS - all podcasts would go off the air because almost no one would listen to them.
Other Ways RSS Has Changed My Life
- RSS lets me, and more than 100 other people subscribed, monitor changes on a wiki I helped the Committee to Protect Bloggers set up called BlogSafer.org, where bloggers living under repressive political regimes can read in six different languages about the current best practices for blogging anonymously.
- RSS (scraped in this case) lets me put a box like the one on the right on my personal blog, so my readers and I can keep up with the latest posts from bloggers fighting repression against monks and their allies in Burma. You can add a box just like that to your site using the following code:
Thanks RSS!
- RSS helps me keep in touch with all kinds of information while I'm roaming around town, thanks to Netvibes Mobile.
- RSS gives me writing fodder here at RWW and lets me keep track of new developments on hundreds of company blogs, with ease. (Companies, send your feed to tips@readwriteweb.com please!)
- RSS lets me subscribe to searches, it lets me post shared items to my blog from inside my social bookmarking service and it lets me find out what just the most popular items from blogs I like are.
Here at RWW we've written about Ways to Filter RSS Feeds, we wrote about the RSS highlights in the year 2007 - we use, write about and think about RSS all the time. (If you want a look at a real far out use of RSS, here's a post I made on my personal blog today about a very complex use case.)
Does the US President Read RSS Feeds?
The current US President may be just getting comfortable with "the Google" but you can be sure he's got advisors that are subscribed to plenty of feeds. Right? Here's the best thing Dave Winer wrote today:
Wouldn't it be great if Obama said, in one of his stump speeches today, that it's RSS Awareness Day and I just want y'all to know I'm aware of RSS and you should be too.
Wouldn't that be reassuring? Heck, the state of Washington has declared an official state holiday (in June) to celebrate RSS. The least the Presidential candidates can do is say they know what it is. They should share at least part of their OPML files (subscription lists) publicly! They should all be obligated to read an AideRSS-determined most popular items feed spliced together from the top 10 human rights organizations in each continent around the world, if you ask me. As if.
Give it a Try!
Three cheers for RSS! If you haven't read feeds before, or you if it's been a long time - then I'd encourage you to step right up and do so right here and now in the iframe below. It's totally private, no one will see your passwords or subscriptions - this is a little window into the very popular and relatively easy to use Google Reader embedded in this post.
Log-in if you need to and grab some subscriptions. You can type in any web page and Google Reader will discover its RSS feed if it has one. Subscribe to our feed, subscribe to http://BoingBoing.com, subscribe to http://TreeHugger.com or hell, subscribe to http://michellemalkin.com if you want your eyelashes burnt off. The point is that you can subscribe to them all and receive updates in one place, with ease.
Once you've done that for awhile - then you'll be ready to come back and read our post about making the most of your RSS feed reader. Knock yourself out and enjoy! Once you've given RSS a chance, you'll likely never want to go back. May your next year be rich in high quality feeds!
Image credits: Megaphone RSS picture is from enterpriserssdayofaction.wikispaces.com and the little guy sitting on the chair that looks like a loo is from FastIcon
Comments
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I'm having the toughest time puzzling out your political leanings from your picture, your Bush links and your Obama quote, I guess my only comment would be:
Wouldn't it be great if Obama came to grips with decades-old economic reality. Like in one of his stump speeches say I just want y'all to know I'm aware of Marxism and you will be too.
Like for me, I just wasn't aware that taxes are supposed to be a punitive measure against the successful. Even if it lowers overall tax revenue and slows growth, he advocates it for issues of 'fairness'. Wonderful, what a modern thinker.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2008/04/17/obamas-truly-radical-capital-gains-tax-agenda/
Posted by: Morgan | May 1, 2008 7:24 PM
Hi Morgan,
I think the point that @marshallk is making is that (based on the Human Rights examples) RSS is a way for candidates, office holders and other people to get a handle on a lot of data quickly. Once you start getting too much data, then you need Ways to Filter RSS Feeds.
Some people filter their incoming data on a particular bias. Thats not wrong, its just part of what makes marshall different from you.
Posted by: martin english | May 1, 2008 8:41 PM
Marshall,
in all friendship, since you're one of the better Tech bloggers: May 1 is "International Workers' Day" -- a holiday pretty much everywhere in the world. Frankly, suggesting to replace the celebration of workers' rights and trade unions with the celebration of the "invention" of RSS, just exemplifies the confusion of the 2.0 crowd. I guess RSS is gonna come help you when the recession makes you loose your job.
Not even Dave Winer would suggest replacing "International Workers' Day" by "RSS day". Get a life, a shave, and a hipper hat.
Posted by: Wolke Snow | May 2, 2008 4:35 AM
I agree with Wolke: May day has important, traditional roots and attempting to hijack it for only one of the technologies we use daily highlights how trivial this atmosphere has become.
Perhaps if we didn't rely on thousands of feeds and did have to visit those people who genuinely interest us, we wouldn't be caught up in such trivia. I would far rather Obama talked about the rising cost of gas, the lack of universal health care coverage, the war in Iraq, the growing unemployment...anything other than RSS. In other words, the important things.
Syndication feeds are important, true, but so is the internet, the computer, the specifications, such as XML and HTTP that underly all of this, and so on. Do we have a day for each of these now, too?
As for this environment being 'dead' if there were no feeds, perhaps it would have kept out those who are only in it for the popularity and the money, but a lot of people had web pages and published online and yes, even had "weblogs" before there were feeds. We didn't know if we were read or not, because all that mattered is that we liked what we were doing.
Now we've been told so many times how all that matters is whether we appear on Techmeme or some leaderboard; have a certain rank in Technorati; a number of subscribers in Google reader. Told that if we don't, what we do doesn't matter. Told how we don't matter many times, we've lost the joy of creation.
Celebrate RSS day? Not likely.
Posted by: Shelley | May 2, 2008 5:47 AM
@Marshall, a big thank you for such a fantastic coverage.
@Wolve and Shelley, the clash with International Workers Day is my fault :).
When I came up with the idea for an RSS Awareness Day I knew it should be on the first day of some month, so I picked May 1st.
I have been working online for a long time, and since we that have websites work for a global market, I no longer pay attention to holidays (when it is a holiday in one country, it is not on the other so your website must keep going regardless).
The result was that I completely forgot about the holidays on May 1st.
Luckily enough Labor Day in the U.S. is in September, so the overall buzz around the RSS Awareness event was pretty good.
Overall I am not sure if the clash ended up helping or hindering the event. From one site it removes some attention, but from the other it helps one to associate the dates.
Next year we might move it to May 10th or even June 1st, we will see.
Posted by: Daniel Scocco | May 2, 2008 7:13 AM
I think a huge barrier to adoption of RSS by non-technical users is the way that RSS feeds are handled by different browsers. It kills RSS for the un-nerdly.
Click on an RSS feed icon and any number of things could happen.
Sometimes you get thrown a technical curve-ball by being asked do you want to subscribe to XML, Atom 1.0, Atom 2.0. Typical user response? Forget it.
Or you get a category-related curve-ball. What do you want to subscribe to - this category, the parent category, a load of other categories (Our News! Our Opinions! Your Comments!). Typical user response? Forget it.
If you do get beyond those two, you need to sign up to one of many services. Content providers won't push you to one, because they want to be available on all. Subscribe on Bloglines! Google Reader! Feedburner! 20 others! Typical user response? See above.
We understand how RSS powers Web 2.0, but individuals adopting RSS consumption are faced with the web equivalent of the 400m hurdle. The response is a deafening Gah - and understandably so.
Posted by: Ed | May 2, 2008 7:20 AM
Re May Day, the Workers' Holiday is arguably crowding out other, more established holidays itself as well. See Beltane, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltane
Awesome, RSS all the way!
Having said that, talking about RSS is essentially talking SMTP when you're thinking e-mail. Moving forward, I think the best way to evangelize it, is not to focus on RSS as a technology, but rather on the multitude of incredibly useful applications of it.
We'll do our part @ AideRSS. ;-)
Posted by: Ilya Grigorik | May 2, 2008 7:49 AM
Also, re "what's important" - when I write that RSS facilitates things like automatic rebroadcasting of messages from monks under attack in Burma and could lead to vast improvements in international human rights policies of the US government - where do you get off lecturing me in comments about "what's important?"
And in honor, I'll start off the official RSS day poem..I'll let commentators finish it off.
O' RSS where would be without you.
There would be no syndication and no readers yes it's true!
[..]
Posted by: Television Voyeurspy | May 2, 2008 9:48 AM
A small contribution to RSS awareness on the streets of Zagreb, Croatia http://www.flickr.com/photos/jakobinac/sets/
Posted by: Jakobinac | May 3, 2008 10:15 AM
Great to see RSS get some focus. Around the same time as this international RSS Day (1st May), I was also involved in running a Enterprise RSS awareness day (24th April) - the Enterprise RSS Day of Action, see http://enterpriserssdayofaction.wikispaces.com/. I think its interesting in itself that both the Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 communities have identified the need to focus on RSS, but there is obviously a disconnect between the two camps if we can run two events so close to each other! I think this might be a symptom of a bigger disconnect between the world of Web 2.0 and the Enterprise Web 2.0 - what do you think? BTW The logo at the top of the page - which RRW have credited - is from the Enterprise RSS Day of Action. The RSS Day folks have their own badge and banners.
Posted by: James Dellow | May 4, 2008 4:33 PM