Citizen Will

Hey, where’s Dave?

[UPDATE: It appears virtual Dave has died. ]

RSS: Not Just for Blogs Anymore. Really?

The folks from Feedburner, Bloglines and other RSS consumer/producers weigh in.
Chris Frye - Feedburner

• “our service should be invisible”
• oriented towards publishers
• “consumption has gotten very interesting”
• Creation->Deconstruction->Consumption

• Consumption - newsgator, yahoo, technorati, google, ask.com
• Deconstruction - news filters, spliced feeds, personal aggregators, blogs of remixed feeds (spamblogs)
• Considerations: attribution, ownership, usage tracking

Scott Johnson - Feedstar founder

• RSS history - “I’m not going there, I’m not talking about it”
• one of the most brilliant aspects of RSS is that it’s extensible
• might be the first XML that will “matter to mom”
• trivial to create, tougher to consume
• Apple specific extensions: USE THEM
• PODCASTERS - “have an RSS feed of everything you’ve ever done”
• Structred blogging - Marc Canter - micro-content architecture - parseable content
• Problems with RSS - “tracking is hard”, no JavaScript

Robin DeuPree - Bloglines

• crawls 2M feeds - 4 to 5M articles per day
• “value in finding out what the buzz is for today”

Levin - moderator - What happens with MS RSS strategy? Frye - increase RSS usage - huge uptake when iTunes came on…

Johnson - on OPML, “not too interesting”

Deupree - ” the common comment on bloglines is that it’s klunky but also that it’s functional”

MY THEME - Where’s the company’s interest in ethical treatment of their customers?

Deupree - Couple minute overview of Redstone’s acquisition and the potential for abuse. Says Bloglines privacy policy needs to be clarified/cleaned up.

Johnson - “to make my tinfoil hat observation: if people know what you read, they know a lot about you”