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Radio Days: RSS Gains Steam as the
Content Broadcast Stream of Choice |
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16 May 2005 |
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While people associate the Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
site feed capability with weblogs, it's really a medium
unto itself that just happens to be populated with weblogs.
More to the point it's essentially a broadcast medium,
returning the Internet to its Ethernet technical roots and
promoting the ability to push content from anyplace to
anywhere via a common network "ether." Publishers are just
beginning to wrestle with this new broadcast medium in
earnest after amateurs showed the way, just as in the early
days of radio and the Web itself. What they're finding is a
medium that is far cruder than they may like but with far
more potential to become a powerful content delivery medium
than they may imagine. |
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As a kid I
learned how to tune my radio in the evenings to broadcasts from
far, far away, taking advantage of the atmosphere's tendency to
help longer radio waves travel far beyond their local audiences
once the sun had gone down. The "ether," as scientists
used to describe radio waves, allowed me to access broadcasts
from across a continent and eventually around the world with
better equipment and a little luck and patience. The Ethernet
computer networking protocols used for the Internet are based
on the same essential principle as radio's "ether": a common
broadcast medium delivering discrete channels of information.
The broadcast underpinnings of the Web are easy to forget when
you're cruising to one of the billions of Web pages out there
in this ether. Early Web technology got people used to going
places to pick up content - hence the "storefront" metaphors of
early Web ecommerce - but by its nature the Internet
infrastructure that underlies the Web is all about spreading
content around as broadly as the air itself.
With the rising popularity of "Really Simple Syndication"*
(RSS), the XML-based format used for getting feeds of
content such as weblogs automatically from Web sites to one's
own PC or other personal content platform, the Web is
beginning to look very much like the ether in its fullest
sense. With RSS people can pick up weblogs, audio, video and
software for their local consumption with less thinking than it
takes to run a TiVo. Like early radio commercialization was
rather an afterthought with RSS: it's only fairly recently that
Google's AdSense and other ads have emerged in weblogs being
pushed out via RSS. Like so many things Webbish this lack of
in-place commercial infrastructure seemed to contribute to the
initial lackadaisical response to RSS by many publishers. But
in recent days there has been an onslaught of announcements of
content distribution via RSS by mainstream media outlets and
core business content producers; even
American Business Media now has a weblog for the members of
its B2B publishing association. Though its use in professional
circuits still comes in the single digit percentage range in
our research, the importance of RSS as an all-purpose content
broadcast media is now well established.
But as with the Web itself in its early days, there are a
lot of open questions about a technology that's long on promise
but short on technical capabilities and answers to some pretty
basic questions about how to use this medium commercially. Here
are a few items that loom large as stumbling blocks to the
successful commercialization of RSS feeds:
- Sometimes simple is way too simple. As implemented
by most providers the XML content coming through RSS and
related protocols is a bone-simple wrapper for getting basic
content from point "A" to point "B". Like all XML-formatted
messages, there's no inherent presentation structure to RSS
feeds: graphics are minimal and presentation is up to the
reader software that pulls up the content. That's great for
the millions of self-designed publishers who are pushing out
waves of new and interesting content on the Web or for
techies who know how to bend the rules of RSS to do more
sophisticated things with the format, but for the rest of us
it leaves the guts of RSS being about as sophisticated as
email messages with better filtering.
- Remember why those radio ads were so cheap?
As pointed out in a recent ClickZ network article, ads in
RSS feeds aren't necessarily making millions: they're
oftentimes cheaper than ads on Web sites or search engines,
since it's assumed that the pushing of content makes it less
likely that a viewer is motivated to read a particular item
delivered by RSS or to use a link out of an RSS article. Like
the early days of the Web we see some publishers pushing out
RSS in a panic to catch up with the latest trend that they're
afraid of missing and not thinking clearly about commercial
strategies before entering the fray. Managing a medium that
acts much more like a broadcast than a Web page in many ways
requires some careful thinking about how to monetize the
content once it enters the archives of a user's personal
devices intertwined with dozens of other potential articles
of interest from other sources.
- "Nobody goes there any more: it's too crowded,"
as the great baseball sage Yogi Berra once opined. Services
such as
Feedster provide easy search, filtering and
aggregation for RSS feeds. But at some point the inefficiency
of the underpinnings of RSS is going to come home and hurt
its growth. RSS is actually a polling mechanism: your local
software goes out and checks to see if there's anything new
to pick up via RSS on a regular basis, regardless of whether
anything is really new. That's fine when it's a relatively
limited universe of "broadcast" recipients and transmitters,
but media outlets are going to need a lot more horsepower
from RSS to manage large-scale content broadcasts
effectively. More sophisticated versions of the RSS protocol
need to come along quickly.
In spite of these early issues RSS holds out hope for a
bright future in broadcast-like content delivery. Because RSS
is such a simple XML "wrapper" there's lots of room for
sophisticated XML objects to be stored in that wrapper. RSS and
its inevitable descendents will become the main delivery
mechanism for XML-based Web services objects that can deliver
sophisticated presentation, content and functionality to be
stored indefinitely on a user's desktop. Powerful desktop
search software enables users to find local RSS content
effectively, reintroducing elements of motivation and
personalization in viewing RSS content that will bolster the
potential for ads and other contextual monetization schemes.
This will make RSS-style content delivery not just a broadcast
medium but the delivery mechanism for a whole new range of
sophisticated content capabilities serving an audience
intelligently at the end of the broadcast connection. From that
perspective think of RSS as a radio that builds your own local
store. Who would have thought this is what broadcasts would
become in those radio days long ago...
-
John Blossom
*- Just a footnote on
terminology - the acronym "RSS" is typically described as
"Really Simple Syndication" these days, though the techno-speak
used at its inception preferred the term "RDF Site Summary."
This latter definition required explaining yet another acronym,
so it seems to have lost favor.
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