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Blogs Are the Future, RSS (or Atom) Feeds Are "The Plumbing"
Yesterday we retained a couple of news references [1,2] about why RSS feeds are so good.
We've had feeds for over 20 years and this is what gives this site momentum. It's also why we don't need social control media and can snub Google.
As recently as yesterday Doc Searls wrote: "Until Linux Journal hired me in 1996, no publication—tech or otherwise—would employ me. Not full-time, anyway. I was too obsessed with the Internet, the Web, and what I saw as the dawn of a new reality: a digital world we would co-occupy with the natural one. So I self-published on the Web, at Searls.com, where that writing still sits, waiting for me to make all of it https rather than http. This is one of those pieces, published on December 1, 1995, six days before Bill Gates’ “Pearl Harbor” speech to his Microsoft troops. I’ve made minimal edits to add links and correct punctuation."
As it turns out, Searls is still doing OK with a podcast and his own personal blog, which has a short intro and feed. This is how the Web should be. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Dan Q ☛ They love RSS
But I love what it does. I love how it ties the Web together. And I love how it does it: just a resource, at a URL, that the subscriber can hit as frequently, or not, as they like.
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Unstory ☛ They love RSS
RSS is plumbing. A transport format. XML with angle brackets and escaped HTML and a version attribute and the CDATA hack. You don't love it. Your software parses it for you, and you never open the file. You never see the escaping, and you never deal with one misplaced whitespace that breaks the whole document. HTML is forgiving. Browsers render garbage. XML is not. One character and the feed is dead. The person with the heart in their footer would not survive writing one item by hand. Their love is for the club, not the file. It's standard flag overlay. The announcement replaces the doing.
Image source: Routers for the Internet of Stuff