Feed Me

How long have newspapers been around? A few hundred years, right? This is how people got their news for hundreds of years. Beyond the daily newspaper, there was the weekly or monthly periodical. It could be "news" like Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, or something a little deeper, more opinionated, Atlantic, The New Republic, The Economist.

The web's already created a revolution when it comes to the timeliness of news. Sports junkies can now find what's happening in many sports often in real time. Want to know the live score of every Division 1 college basketball game on any night? You can. Indeed, that's been a feature for so long that we don't even realize that such a thing is possible. Who is sending the scores? To whom? How do the websites get it?

Thus, the modern technical person now augments their news with the web. This wouldn't have been possible had the personal computer not decreased in price. Remember when the typical computer was two thousand dollars? It had to drop to one thousand dollars a pop for people to buy them. If you don't need the flexibility of laptops, desktops are a few hundred dollars cheaper.

There are many levels of web savvy. Most everyone who uses a computer that is semi-technical at least has a few favorite websites to visit. Movies, companies, all sorts of people advertise their website. If you know where to type on a browser, you're set to go.

Search engines then provide the glue to find stuff on the Internet. Most everyone just uses Google. It took me a while to switch over, but nowadays I almost exclusively use Google. There are other search engines, Yahoo, and MSN Search, for example, that do just about as good a job as Google, and then many, many others that are lucky to see a query a month from users. No one wants to find new search engines over and over.

Then, there are sites like Amazon and Ebay, where people can purchase online. Admittedly, there are still a few folks paranoid about having their information online, but the convenience certainly outweighs the threat, so most people are content using the net to buy things.

But what happens if you're starting to visit a bunch of websites, or you want to read some good blogs or good blogcasts. Experts have estimated that there are somewhere on the order of thirty million blogs out there, and that doesn't include spam blogs whose purpose is either to encourage click fraud, or to add links to a real blog to increase its visibility. There's no way any reasonable person could even begin to find desirable blogs to read.

Which is why many people often don't read blogs. But, I did, even before I got RSS. I'd head to Joel's site every few days to see what was happening, and most days, nothing was happening. Though I've been diligent about that habit, people would tell me, "don't do that, get an RSS feed".

For a long time I resisted the idea. I didn't like RSS feed aggregators. They didn't seem comfortable or convenient. I wasn't so technically unsavvy as to not know what it meant to subscribe to an RSS feed, though there are plenty of people who lack that savvy.

And that's the point I want to make. RSS has caught the content providing websites by storm. Here's the idea, for those who aren't familiar with it. A decent website will have one or more URL whose content is XML. XML looks a bit like HTML, but it contains data, and is not meant to describe a webpage.

When you subscribe to an RSS feed, you're basically bookmarking this link. There are two ways to bookmark it. Either you use a web-based RSS aggregator. Two of the more famous ones are Bloglines and NewsGator, but there's also MyYahoo.

Web-based aggregators are good when you aren't always near your computer. You can be at a kiosk somewhere or at work or a friend's laptop, head to the website, log in, and you can see what's new.

The other way to view RSS content is to use a desktop application. Unfortunately, the software depends on the platform you use. I'm currently using Omea as my desktop RSS aggregator, which looks a lot like Outlook, MyYahoo on the web, and Vienna on my Mac.

What does an RSS aggregator do? Basically, it checks the content of the URL (the RSS feed). The content of that file is basically several things. There's the title of the article, a brief description of the article, and a link to the article. It's up to the website to update this URL with recent data.

Like a web browser (sometimes because it is one), a good aggregator displays this information in a pleasant way, either like Outlook or like a Yahoo news page.

There are severals ways to subscribe. You can look for an RSS tag of some sort. It's usually a tiny little icon that says something like RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, or Atom Feed. Unfortunately, there are three different flavors of RSS feeds, and so some sites have to support several versions. Some websites have tried to make it easier.

If you go to TechCrunch for example, and click on the Orange radio sign that indicates RSS feed, you see about 7-8 icons that include Bloglines, MyYahoo, NewsGator, Rojo, Pluck, and a few others. If you're using any of these feed readers, you can typically click it (assuming you're logged in), and it adds it to your subscriptions.

Otherwise, you have to do a little more work. There are two ways to try. First, if you do see a feed like RSS 1.0, drag the icon into your reader. Often, this will be enough to subscribe to it. If that doesn't work, you'll have to find a button that says to add the feed by URL, and cut and paste the URL that contains the RSS data.

Now, many RSS readers let you aggregate this information into folders. But any step you take beyond the basics is enough to discourage people. For example, I had expected that a small percentage of people even bother to use folders. I was told that maybe 25% of Bloglines users even have folders. Many of those use folders on their computer, but can't think of how they would use that feature to manage RSS feeds.

The folders are a bit like tagging. It can provide a way to categorize the feeds you subscribe to. You might be interested in sports and technology and create a folder for each. Apparently, many people are blogging about knitting.

But the real problem is the number of blogs out there. I met a guy who's a Ph.D. student trying to classify blogs based on goodness and content. He's doing so based on folders people use to classify them. That way, he hopes, users can find the blogs they want without trying to sift through millions of blogs, which of course, no one would want to do, or could reasonably do.

But let me back up some.

A few days ago, shortly after setting up my RSS aggregator, specifically, Vienna, on my Mac, I decided I would subscribe to TechMeme, recently rechristened from the awful tech.memeorandum.com. Immediately, it told me that Gabe, who runs TechMeme, was planning to be in town. Usually, he hangs out with Omer, who he used to live with.

Common among the blogoscenti are these open calls to meet. We were to meet at Urban Barbeque in Rockville. I didn't really know of this place before, though one of my housemates had eaten there. He said the place was tiny.

Initially, there were only four of us there. This was Gabe, me, Cynthia, who is the primary blogger at ipdemocracy.com, a blogging site that covers issues related to technology and politics as it affects public policy, and this guy who works for blogdigger.com, a search engine meant to find interesting blogs.

There's an interesting story about that. The guy who was from Blogdigger works for a guy (with?) named Mike Miller. I used to TA for Mike Miller. He used to teach a Fortran class. I TAed with another grad student named Jan Rizzutto (I'm probably mangling the name). There's now husband and wife. Small world. I think I recall him saying something about Phil Rizzutto who's in baseball? I don't follow baseball well enough to know. Small world.

We were later joined by a few other folks. One guy was the Ph.D. student doing work in finding spam blogs and finding topically related blogs. One guy I didn't talk to so I don't know what he does, but he seems to travel partly on the blog circuit. Another Asian guy was there, but I didn't talk to him either. Omer also showed up with his friend. In the end, we had 9 people. Urban BBQ is not really set up to handle this.

Now, it seems, with such meetings, taking pictures is the first order of business. Cynthica pulled out her cam-phone. I carry a tiny camera myself, the venerable Canon SD-200. Gabe had an older Sony. I recently bought the W50, but haven't migrated over to my new camera yet. I took a few pix. I know Gabe gets rather self-conscious about pix, but it would have been odd of him to say no to pix given that someone else was already doing it.

The discussion focused around blogs, most obviously. There's a particular problem I see with this, and that's that not everyone is interested in blogs. I know, I know. This was the reason we were there in the first place. If this were stitch and bitch, wouldn't you expect people to knit or crochet and bitch about whatever? I mean, why would they talk about the blogosphere. When you advertise to bloggers and blog fans, you expect to talk about blogging.

But there's something about being so completely immersed in this culture that it has the effect of putting blinders on. I asked where people thought the blogosphere was heading in a few years. I like asking crystal ball questions. It's true most people will guess wrong, but what I discover is that most people simply don't care for the exercise. They worry only what they can see in the horizon.

There aren't like Bruce Sterling whose expected to forecast stuff fifty years down the line because he's a science fiction writer. It's true, he's likely to be seriously wrong, that something will sprout that no one expected. I mean, think about the blogosphere. Why has it grown so much? Companies are willing to host blogs for free and have created simple enough software for everyone to use.

I'm using Blogger, and it's pretty darn simple. Blogger has made glacial progress for a company run by Google. It doesn't do many things different from what it did last year, but that's most likely because it's pitched to the least common denominator, the average Joe Blogger. Joe Blogger doesn't want to see the blog web page change every few months until he can no longer figure out what to do because the folks redesign it all the time.

One thing that's missing, I believe, is what we had just done in person. We had gotten together to eat at a restaurant in Rockville. Now, it was something of a trek for a few folks. One guy came from Baltimore. Another took forty minutes to get to the place, but was planning to visit his folks who lived close by. I happen to go to Rockville a lot, so it wasn't a big deal for me.

There was talk of getting bloggers together to talk about blogging regularly, but with a crowd that lives near Virginia, and one that lives near Baltimore, it's inconvenient to many.

One possible solution is to use MMORPGS, much like Worlds of Warcraft or Final Fantasy. It doesn't have to quite get to avatar status, though that's one way to do it. You could, for example, use the built-in webcam feature from the Mac, and if bandwidth permitted, have several people talk. But I feel this kind of remote meeting is going to be the way people communicate in the future.

People don't like, I know, because it feels weird. But that inhibition may occur because it's the new edge that most of us haven't explored. There are many people who don't get on the web or use RSS aggregators because it's something that doesn't feel comfortable. They don't read blogs because they're not used to it. They don't know how to find it. They'd rather read books, play sports, watch Oprah, cook, and do the things that people have been doing for years. To push that to a new realm of experience that people have not done at all is odd.

If people start heading down this line, it will resemble stuff people were writing in books in the eighties, when cyberpunk SF was all the rage, pioneered by William Gibson's dystopian vision, Neuromancer. Writers like Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling jumped into this brave new feature, where people would jack up to an alternate, artificial universe, perhaps explaining the strangely prescient Philip K. Dick who wrote of futures with loss of identity as a subject.

Even the Matrix films tap into this cyberspace when Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus hook up into the matrix. We're not necessarily going to have that kind of experience, but it would allow for the kind of communication we're lacking because physical distances separate us.

But reality. I ended up eating the 2-meat combo, with pulled pork and beef brisket. I should have paid more attention to the sauces I was adding, or in my case, not adding, because I had a rather bland concoction, instead of something fiery. I should have noticed it, but I was engaged in the ongoing conversation.

It's again an odd happenstance that I was recently trying to get back to using RSS, and read briefly about OPML, which is some kind of, I assume, XML format for representing the feeds you susbscribe to, which can be exported, primarily so you can switch to other readers (basically a way to save your RSS bookmarks and move it elsewhere). Bloglines apparently makes this publicly accessible so anyone can read it.

In the conversation, people were naturally curious, how do you do it Gabe? (Meaning, what's the secret behind TechMeme). He doled out a few small nuggets, but I'm sure he's spent so much time thinking, tweaking, testing, that even the small nuggets would be sufficiently hard to duplicate in a real setting.

One thing that's interesting is that this new technology means new ways of making money, and that sense of capitalism is not far from what bloggers want. There was some kid who had a website with a million pixels. He charged a buck a pixel, but had minimum requirements for how many pixels you could buy at a time. That site was apparently threatened by an extortionist who wanted money or else he'd bring the site down using some kind of denial of service.

Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if the guy did it himself, to get the news, to get people to go the website, to find a few folks that would spend the money to give him the million bucks. If so, more power to him. The problem with the idea is that it only works once. Heck, who'd visit that website more than once? I mean, I don't know why the advertisers even bother. It's hideous to look at, and too hard to tell what's going on.

TechMeme, for example, doesn't earn Gabe any money. He's had opportunities to make money from it, though mostly, the terms haven't been to Gabe's liking. I suppose he'd be happy if people just gave donations, but he hasn't gone so far as to do that either. I suppose he's looking for some innovative way to advertise, rather than stoop to stuff that some guy I used to hear on the radio do. He was some competitor to Howard Stern, and his brother would sell all sorts of goods, which he'd mention on the radio the whole time.

A few months ago I wasn't even really plugged into this community, and I'm not really that plugged into it now. It's time consuming business, and certainly takes away from traditional ways I could be spending my time.

I read an article by a guy I know who writes film reviews. He said that we're living in an age where inventions are being created like crazy, and his sense was that we wouldn't even begin to comprehend the kind of world we'll live in twenty years from now. Even so, even with cell phones, wireless networks, laptops, websites, RSS feeds, digital cameras, fast Internet, and so forth, there are still many things we still do the same old way we've ever done it.

There's still the daily commute. There's still eating at restaurants, watching movies, going for a walk. True, somethings have evolved. For example, there's more choices in restaurants. Coffee houses have sprouted up everywhere to become a hangout throughout the country. Most people are more savvy when it comes to international cuisine. We can order samosas at Indian restaurants, sip on a large bowl of pho, nibble on empanadas.

Perhaps, most notably, guys are now doing things that once were relegated to women. Guys cook their own meals, clean their own clothes. Women work, rather than stay at home cleaning house. This has changed the way men and women interact. That, to me, is perhaps more profound, between the generation in their fifties and those in their thirties.

And we're all becoming more well-read. We read more, whether it be useful information or not. We find people of similar interest. I remember I used to follow tennis, I thought, rather rabidly. But I discovered this wasn't the case. I joined rec.sport.tennis and talked to people who were far more into tennis than I was. That was my first foray into what might be termed as the netnewsphere, which is far smaller than the blogosphere, but was a community before the current sense of community.

The new world of web are bringing people together that would otherwise not have met. Think about what Gabe did. He effectively put an ad at his own website, asking people who read to come to a restaurant. Sure, this wasn't Bono saying he'd be over for tea, which would send thousands en masse (indeed, Alton Brown was advertised coming to Border's and it was packed). Those were advertised in the old-fashioned way, by newspaper. Now there are websites.

Here's the problem with communicating. At one point, people would read the same newspaper or watch the same TV programs. With the bazillion bits out there in web stuff, the overlap that you have with someone else is rather low. And at some point, will some people pull a Knuth, and just back out of the whole thing, giving themselves complete time to themselves away from everything. Knuth is, at heart, a mathematician, and so having time to himself is critical. Email, to him, is so much spam, unlikely to create something of value to him, and likely to waste his time. It's no wonder he stopped reading it.

But would people cut off their RSS feed, and not be hooked up to opinion and news all the time? Would they feel mighty guilty if they didn't hear the latest? Check their email? Talk to their friends.

As people get addicted to the different kinds of information from RSS, maybe some people would rather sacrifice email than RSS. It may be soon when people do indeed say RSS is more important to them than email.