Remixing and Speculation on The Future of RSS
Amazon DevCon is happening right now and happily the Amazon Web Services Blog is blogging it in "near-real-time" (hat-tip to Greg Linden for linking to it). I haven't browsed through all the notes from day 1 yet, but I feel compelled to post about Rael Dornfest's speech on the subject of "remix: beyond rip, mix, burn". Some real gems in this...
--> Rael: "Remixing requires good source, inspiration, skill, trial and error, magic, and some combinatorics."
I had to look up 'combinatorics'. The Wikipedia definition is too complex (but no doubt correct). I like this simpler, user-friendly, definition of Combinatorics: "The branch of mathematics dealing with the number of different ways objects can be selected or arranged."
--> Rael on data remixing:
"Remix your data. Scraping begat XML which begat APIs. Hacks led to standards which
led to business opportunity. Syndicated ecommerce. Google/Amazon/Alexa, Amazon/eBay for
buying and selling, etc.
Creative commons, Salesforce, Blogger/Typepad, Technorati, Feedster, Bloglines.
Delicious, feedburner, typekey. Glued with JavaScript, Perl, Python, PHP as glue.
Lesson: There are parts of the platform that you don't have to own."
--> The following has got to be the most concise attempt yet at explaining how blogging is impacting on journalism (and there have been a lot of non-concise attempts!): "Blogging [is] remixing journalism"
--> On RSS:
"RSS reinvented syndication, [it's] not a remix. RSS is still an approximation of something, not sure where it will go. Tiny compared to where it will be. Everyone monetizes RSS. Perhaps a bubble already."
--> Finally, here's the speech in a nutshell:
"Rules for remixing:
* If it ain't broke it soon will be
* Need to focus on why it is broken, how is not enough
* Look to the alpha geeks
* If you are an alpha geek, look to the consumer
* Remix even if you have no ear for music
* Keep it open and hackable
* Think of the end-to-end
* If it ain't broke, it soon will be"
Information Remixing
Note that a lot of Rael's speech referenced hacking, as befits a conference for Web Services developers. But the highlights I've picked out are just as relevant to Information Remixing, which is I guess my forte.
I frequently talk about remixing (ref: a search of my blog for the word "remix"). For example, take this excerpt from a post I wrote nearly a year ago:
"We can mix and match RSS feeds as we (the "consumers") see fit. Perhaps future generations of tools like Blogdigger Groups will allow us to mix and match microcontent, much like a DJ scratching a rap song on top of a Beatles melody."
In 2005 we're starting to see tools that make such remixing of data possible - and that's exciting. e.g. did you know that in PubSub you can create custom RSS feeds using combinations of topics, people, sites, data types, and other things.
Future of RSS - One Scenario
Here's a prediction from me on the future of RSS: in the not too distant future, more people will subscribe to topic/tag/remix feeds than feeds of actual people. Is that a scary thought?
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I think you're spot-on with that observation.
If it all works the way one would hope, it ought to be great. It's just the potential abuse of tags that's pretty scary, I think.
At this rate, though, we're likely to find out sooner than later.
Cheers
Andre (sen no sen)
Posted by: sennnosen | January 21, 2005 1:52 AM
Hey, Richard.
While i'm a regular reader of your posts, I believe this is the first time i'm leaving anything behind after a visit :)
Anyhow,
getting to your rip/mix/burn of information theme, have you seen this yet?
http://www.broom.org/epic/
This basically portrays what web 2.0 will be like 10 years from now. There's a great deal about google automatically generating contents based on personal preferences (all imaginary, though)
I believe when it truly comes down to the basic "units" of information, there must be something more than simple "microcontent" units. To me, things such as subjects, authors, etc. are only analagous to molecules in chemistry, not quite "atoms" or even smaller particles. It seems that as our understanding of the intrinsic nature of information intrinscally grows, it'll gradually come down to mix/rip/burn of smaller and smaller units and particles of information.
I've written some stuff on this theory on my blog, but sorries. because it's all in Korean. ;)
Posted by: twdanny | January 21, 2005 1:58 AM
Re: 'Here's a prediction from me on the future of RSS: in the not too distant future, more people will subscribe to topic/tag/remix feeds than feeds of actual people.'
This seems to be where David Watanabe is going with 'Smart Feeds' in NewsFire (http://www.newsfirerss.com/). I confess that I don't much like the feature as I want to keep the sources of information distinct and separate. Others, however, seem to think it's great.
LTM
Posted by: L. Thomas Martin | January 21, 2005 6:02 AM
I love the quality of comments on my blog. I don't get that many, but the comments I do get are always very thoughtful.
Senosen, I agree that tags will start to be abused by the more nefarious types of people out there. How long before tag spammers? (eck!)
twdanny, great to hear from you! I'd like to hear from all my readers, actually. I have seen the Epic video before and it blew me away! Pity I can't read about your mini-microcontent theories :-(
LTM, I haven't checked out Newsfire yet, thanks for the tip :-)
Posted by: Richard MacManus | January 21, 2005 8:00 PM
See [link to an external post - just adding this to break up the text in my comments summaries on the right :-) RM] http://web.archive.org/web/20010223204516/
miski.sourceforge.net/miski-white-paper.html for an earlier view on the "future of RSS" (which was written when I didn't even know what RSS was). In particular I introduced the notion of "reposting", which I imagined to involve nothing more than a single press of a button, and which would result in the affected item being retransmitted instantly to all subscribers of the person doing the reposting who had not already received the same item from elsewhere. To the get the desired level of "instantness", the system had to use some form of push technology, which current RSS falls a bit of short of.
Posted by: Philip Dorrell | January 25, 2005 7:08 AM