Why RSS should have your attention
It's NOT just "push" all over again
The famously brief success of Pointcast back in the 90's left us with a number of business lessons, an inconclusive first (and very early) impression of Data Subscription, and the annoying buzz phrase "Push" Technology; which immediately had to be balanced against "Pull" Technology.
Once Pointcast was extinct, and people lacked for an actual example they could study and think about, the "Push" and "Pull" lost their high-tech cache, and very soon nobody knew what they were supposed to mean anymore, beyond their prior significance on the doors of the world.
Then, of course, the bubble burst, and the last thing anybody wanted to think about was a company that had failed before the bubble burst.
For those who don't remember or were too young, Pointcast gave you ad-subsidized, user-configurable content (news, movie listings, horoscopes, weather, etc.) to the desktop. It ran on a large client-side application you had to download.
Millions did.
In the dust cloud of Pointcast's demise, something else was largely missed -- for a "Push" technology, there sure was an enormous amount of pulling going on --
RSS is not new. So, why now? In a word: blogs. I could write about blogs all day.
The most important thing that blogs are doing, and what you need to register for purposes of the present argument, is they are re-distributing power.
As usual, when that happens [harrumph], some folks are in denial. Yet happening it is, and with sweeping implications for all of online advertising and most of the ways business is done online. In this new order, blogs have clout. Google loves them. More than that, for the ways in which the blogosphere is also a network within but separate from the Internet, vast new capabilities and strengths are being perfected there.
How the blogosphere and the Open Source Movement have brought us closer to the Democratic Ideal is worthy of a separate treatment. But, for purposes of the present argument, note simply that everybody is getting a blog, and they are doing it for expression, for money, or both.
Meanwhile, as the "infrastructure" of the blogosphere was being built and conceived, RSS was also evolving and improving. If you're wondering how RSS got so well integrated into the blogosphere and other Open Source projects, I can tell you. Because it was all the same people -- Developers, influencers, programmers, idealists, Net-Socialists. Basically, people who believe the things the Web was supposed to be about were very correct, and who see now an opportunity to make a change for the better.
Pointcast failed not because it wasn't popular. It was IMMENSELY popular. It failed because it choked up all the bandwidth of corporate networks, and brought traffic to a crawl. CTO's told CEOs who told HR Directors who told employees that Pointcast was as bad as a virus, and you'd be fired if you had it installed on your desktop. Well, that'll put a damper on demand.
The public will consume RSS feeds aggressively. Why? Because feed providers are going to make them extremely attractive. Why? Because they REALLY want people to tap their feeds. Why? Because tapping someone's feed is the equivalent of a "vote" in their favor. Votes indicate trusted sources. And Google has been shifting the emphasis of Page Rank from [formulaic] Relevancy to [subjective] Trust. In this scheme, links you buy (conventional ads) are becoming far less influential to your PR than links you are given.
The layman will blog and consume RSS because it's fun and participatory.
Pros will do it to make money and be bigshots.
Corporations will do it because they have to, because their customers are knocking on the blogdoor.
RSS is, whittled down to ESSENCE, an agreement between parties to do something a certain way, consistently. Thus, RSS is an expression of the Web's basic method of functioning. The principle of RSS (making your content easily available to secondary publishers, re-publishers, aggregators, editors and -- last but not least-- to the spiders) will persist FOREVER, even if the acronym changes.