DeeKnow’s Grotto

One of my colleagues forwarded me a great blog post by Tony Hirst from last year which wrapped up important features and opportunities for use of RSS as a sort of call to arms, or manifesto as Tony refers to it. The post got me thinking about one particular aspect of RSS talk that winds me up. The evangelisation by some (not Tony) and its use and promotion in areas that aren’t necessarily appropriate.

There seems to be a never-ending supply of hype around empowering users through shiny wee orange buttons linking to RSS feeds, but efforts to harness the technology really are better directed towards machine-machine/publishing system/CMS integration, syndication and mash-up development.

In other words, behind the scenes magik happening without user involvement or awareness. Hell, its hard enough to convince some developers that they should RSS-enable services and content let alone educate less web savvy end-users about its benefits.

Now I don’t want you to get the wrong impression (well that’s not true, I don’t care) coz I am a fan of RSS and other uses of XML or structured data to exposure reusable content and data, and have been actively integrating RSS generation and consumption in tools I work on for many years now. Jesus, I was even a fan-boy of Dave Winer and user of his tools (Radio & Frontier) for many years.

But one thing that bugs me about RSS is the suggestion that it’s of real direct conscious use to end-users and that we must educate them on this matter, but is this really the case?

In browser subscriptions? Nope.

Your average casual web user just doesn’t GET what those pretty orange icons are and really doesn’t care much for optimising their news reading activity. In fact for many people I’m sure they enjoy the serendipity of wandering about from one web site to another, who know’s what you’ll read next. I don’t believe information overload is something every web user suffers from. What about GoogleReader and Bloglines?. Come on, lets be honest, other than web-geeks and news-addicts no one is really taking the time to learn how to use those tools effectively. Browser support for auto-discovery though prominent in the UI is still the domain of expert consumers.

User defined channels? Nope.

User driven customisation of news portal content failed to capture a market in the 90’s and it really isn’t any different now despite technologies like RSS? Ongoing positive-action required to manage those channels is as unlikely as creating them in the 1st place, and the resulting decay and diminishing value of those customised views results in users abandoning the mechanism. Personalisation is another matter of course and some sites get this right on occasion.

Trusted relationships? Nope.

As a consumer I may happen to trust my local newspaper, or bbc.co.uk, or stuff that magically appears on news.google.com, but I don’t think we should overestimate the value Joe-average puts on relationships with content providers. Look at how unquestionably most folks consume the stuff big-media outlets like Fox, MSNBC, Sky are generating for eye-balls across the globe.

User publishing? Yes, to a degree.

A tiny fraction of the population actively publish blogs and other web content, a slightly larger volume may read them. Fortunately none of these folks need to directly interact with or manage RSS as it is generally auto-generated. The beauty of these RSS resources is in the automated indexing and relationship building that goes on behind the scenes.

Syndication? Yes! Mash-ups? Yes! A glue between disparate publishing mechanisms? Yes!

These back-end uses demonstrate the real power of RSS. Its no coincidence one of the ‘S’ in RSS stands for SYNDICATION. Integrating resources and adding value on behalf of the user to reflect their personal preferences, history or relationships is more likely than direct-action taken by users to manage RSS and messy URLs themselves.

RSS for everything? Definitely not.

The early schism in the community over evolution of the original relatively simple RSS format into the RDF based one, and resulting tit-for-tat nonsense as features and elements were added to subsequent releases, and finally the arrival of the likes of ATOM on the scene no doubt put off a heap of developers committing to using RSS in any form until there was some stability. These days there are RSS parsers capable of handling the variations for every development platform. It’s stating the obvious I know but RSS isn’t the only means of facilitating web interoperability, trying to make it do too much is one reason for the mess of overlapping specs that RSS became. Invent your own schema for your dedicated purpose, publish it, share it, and others can bloody well Transform it with XSLT if they dont like it.

The various forms of RSS are all great enabling technologies but the only organic consumers who actually benefit from direct use or engagement with RSS are still power web users and readers. In my opinion we are better of not trying to introduce it to the end-user vocabulary at all.

Please, lets encourage developers to build structured interfaces into their apps and services so we can build sexy mash-ups with it, but as far as end-users are concerned lets all just pretend RSS doesn’t really exist. But don’t tell Dave Winer I asked you to do so.