Feed The World’s Press With RSS

Microsoft stands accused of usurping an rising internet application, and information professionals are suggested to sit up and take notice. Not therefore abundant of the non-story itself, but the underlying trends that spell fundamental change to their industry.

To put things in perspective, here’s a tech flashback: At the height of the dot-com bubble, when billions of venture capital greenbacks were being blown on one 15-minute cyberfad after the following - and Netscape and Microsoft were at each different’s throats in the vicious Browser Wars - the business media caught wind of a brand new buzzword: ‘Push’.

Push technology was going to redefine the web. Why should we tend to pay hours simply surfing (I mean, how a lot of fun does that sound?) when we may spell out our necessities and allow content providers to ‘push’ what we tend to were wanting for to our desktop?

For a whereas there, push gave the impression of the answer to all our internet wants and in 1997, push player PointCast gave the look to be really value the $450 million bid made by News Corp. 2 years later, PointCast went for simply $7 million after running into the kind of revenue problems that may burst the global dot-com bubble.

Push became synonymous with dot-com failure. Wanted to sound a bum note at a Silicon Valley party in 2001? Just slip “Boo.com”, “Irrational exuberance” or “push” into the conversation. Then sit back and watch them choke on their frappuccinos.

While push may be dead and buried, it lives on - in spirit, at least - in an exceedingly technology that has been quietly taking the internet by stealth. Where push tried the direct approach and failed, the new contender – RSS – has crept in through the backdoor.

Here’s the tech stuff in an exceedingly nutshell: RSS (that stands for Wealthy Web site Summary, RDF Site Outline, or Really Straightforward Syndication; take your choose) has emerged as the dominant delivery methodology for news websites and weblogs.

RSS is, in flip, a file format of XML (no selection with this one, it’s Extensible Markup Language), and, frankly, even data professionals can end the tricky part of their RSS education here.

What matters now is this: RSS is everywhere. And it’s not just the 800lb gorilla sites like Google News (http://news.google.com) and Yahoo! News (http://news.yahoo.com/) making use of RSS - want to keep track of the twenty five hottest urban legends? Snopes.com’s feed is here: http://www.snopes.com/data/top25uls.rss. Or why not subscribe to The Mead Feed(http://www.gotmead.com/atom.xml) and receive “random maunderings [sic] on the mead-creating trade”.

For public relations professional, gaining comprehensive information of RSS and a way to use it’s an absolute no brainer – major news aggregators are anticipating press releases right currently, as long as they are provided in RSS format. And RSS feeds of search engine results can automate daily press clipping chores.

Even the lowliest news and data sites are providing full RSS compliance. That is why several developers and other early adopters were outraged by Microsoft’s perceived highjacking of RSS last month.

Word hit the road that Huge Bill was designing to refer to RSS feeds as “net feeds” in a future version of Web Explorer. Foul, cried the geeks. Microsoft was merely renaming an existing technology and shouldn’t be allowed to pass this technology off as its own innovation.

However the furore was short lived when the identical geeks realised the overwhelming majority of pc users didn’t have a clue what RSS was in the first place, never mind how to place it to sensible use. And when it had been also pointed out that Google and the open-supply web browser Firefox also gave RSS feeds a lot of user-friendly names, the Microsoft bashing died all the way down to the usual background noise.

In fact, most commentators skimmed over the key part of the Microsoft scare: the Internet Explorer integration. It doesn’t matter what it’s referred to as, simply as long as the main players see enough potential in it to maintain and expand their support for it.

Like it or not, Microsoft still holds the lion’s share of the browser market and if RSS is to continue its conquest of the net, then a little facilitate from Bill may be just the ticket.

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