Bear Flag Republic Radio Weblog

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"Along came My.UserLand, an RSS-based portal with a difference: archiving. While MNN displayed only the latest version of a particular channel, UserLand archived snapshots on an hourly basis. The RSS 'aggregator' was born. Aggregation brings with it a new concept, the decoupling of items (stories) from their parent channels. Rather than a set of web sites being boiled down into rectangular news-boxes, RSS can be presented as a confluence of feeds from disparate sources with a focus on timeliness rather than channel. While maintaining an item's original association with its channel, Meerkat ('An Open Wire Service') presents items in reverse-chronological order, also allowing filtering, searching, grouping, and sharing." [via CodingTheWeb.com Newslog: RSS]

Unless you've seen and used an RSS news aggregator, you won't really understand that paragraph, but there is a lot of power in it. I'm struggling with the concept of RSS because I know how it helps me and I can see its potential in so many other contexts. But I don't know enough about it to help move my vision forward. Radio's news aggregator is a great starting point, but sometimes the limitations frustrate me.

This article by Rael Dornfest provides a nice, concise history of RSS that even I can understand (at least, on some level). It was written in July, 2000, and even then the whole metadata issue was rearing its head:

"As RSS continues to be re-purposed, aggregated, and categorized, the need for an enhanced metadata framework grows. Channel- and item-level title and description elements are being overloaded with metadata and HTML. Some are even resorting to inserting unofficial ad-hoc elements (e.g., , , ) in an attempt to augment the sparse metadata facilities of RSS.

Discussion forum syndicators are forced to rely upon title-based threading. Aggregators are grappling with the problem of providing information about the original source of an item when removed from its channel context. News syndicators are wondering where to embed a company's stock symbol, currently relegated to silliness.

Solutions to these and future RSS metadata needs have primarily centered around a) the inclusion of more optional metadata elements in the RSS core, b) XML-namespace based modularization, and c) putting the RDF back into RSS. For an overview of the modularization versus core extension discussion, take a look at Leigh Dodds' recent XML-Deviant column, 'RSS Modularization.' "

Obviously some of these things have been addressed in the interim (Radio and other tools now support categories, titles, etc.), but as a librarian, I'm really missing the contexts that would link everything together. I should be able to easily find all of the blogs written by lawyers, librarians, or law librarians. Rael concludes that metadata is the key, and I find myself agreeing:

"RSS has seen a large degree of adoption from independent content producers, yet has failed to grab the attention of mainstream content providers. Perhaps the high eyeball/effort ratio message just hasn't been delivered. Or is it the "terminal beta" feel of RSS with its < 1.0 versioning that makes anyone but early adopters nervous? The word needs to get out, in executive summaries, and white papers, and adoption by more key mainstream web sites.

RSS also needs more "killer apps," which can be provided (in this author's opinion) by a richer metadata framework within which to build. Scalable extensibility is a must if RSS is to continue being re-purposed. Yet this extensible RSS must remain relatively simple (somewhere between HTML and hard-core RDF should do!) and backward-compatible in a way that will bring the current user-base along, rather than leaving it behind."

Obviously the generation of RSS feeds by the New York Times, the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, and the Baltimore Sun are one giant leap for mankind, but we've still got a ways to go. So almost two years later, I'm asking the same questions Rael was - how do we get there?

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