Bob Stepno: Attention Deficit Weblog

Why RSS should be renamed FRED

Sun, 02 May 2004 05:14:34 GMT

... not really. But some folks are debating whether the public needs a more meaningful or memorable abbreviation than RSS for the "Really Simple Syndication" format used for sharing weblog content and news-summary feeds.

I agree with Lisa and Dave that it's too late for a name change and that the three letters RSS work just fine. They even inspire some Really Simply Silly discussion, including the page you are looking at. Frankly, I have more trouble with the aggravatingly polysyllabic words "syndication" and "aggregator," but my definitions are longer, and they use the word "stuff" a lot:

Syndication: "Sending stuff for folks to read or republish."
Aggregator: "A program that puts stuff together where you can read it without going to dozens of original sources."

"Webfeed," which someone suggested as a new name for RSS, to me just adds to the clutter of ugly compound webwords. I say call a reader a reader and a feed a feed. Keep it short and snappy. Can't we just call a feed a feed, no matter what is shovelling it -- RSS or RDF or XML or some new atomized acronym? What will be the next à la mode flavor of XML? Call it all RSS. It doesn't matter. We could say it means "really simple subscriptions" or "randomly sent stuff."

Or we could call it FRED, a friendly name that brings to mind memorably stylish leading men in couples like Fred & Ginger, Fred & Ethel or Fred & Barney (sorry, Wilma).

Parental guidance alert... a few lines below, this note almost says a naughty word, followed later by what some might consider a suggestive phrase or two.

FRED 1: Because the name doesn't matter.
I was once editor of a college newspaper with an old corny name. The school had a magazine with a cuter name, inspired by a Lewis Carroll character who did drugs. When I left campus, a new editor decided to merge the two publications and wanted to know which name to use. I told her to just get the best writing on campus and print it, that the name didn't matter: "Call it 'Fred' if you want." She took me literally. The college paper was named "Fred" for a year or two. But the name didn't matter.

FRED 2: But the acronym has potential.
A friend who heard my Fred story had her own. Her father's radio station had been taken over in the 1970s by a conglomerate that fired half the staff and replaced them with a big tape drive playing syndicated programs. Someone put a sign on the machine, naming it FRED -- short for "F-ing Ridiculous Electronic Device." A second drive was "ALFRED," for "Another Lousy..."

FRED 3: Fine ideas, but all too late.
The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that Netscape, Dave and the rest back in 1999 should have called RSS "FRED," short for "feed reading," or "fairly reliable electronic delivery," or for a variation on definition 2 above, depending on the user's mood. But now it's too late. RSS will do.

While on the subject of what might have been, I think that instead of "XML," the little orange buttons should have said "Drink Me." (I'm not suggesting "Eat Me" for obvious reasons; besides, in Alice "drink me" did the shrinking, while "eat me" did the expanding.)

"Eat Me/Drink Me" buttons might be fun, but Brian Bell's I love RSS candy hearts come close enough. Besides, my Dad's initials were RSS, so those images always make me smile. I wish he had lived to see them, not to mention the "I love RSS" T-shirts, which arrived about 20 years too late. (I think he would have a good laugh if someone came up with a "Kiss my RSS" graphic, for that matter.)

Incidentally, I would have put this on my Harvard blog, since it doesn't have much to do with this blog's alleged journalism theme, but the Berkman server was playing FRED (2) again when I started this. Either that or there was a May Day labor action at Harvard.

(Edited and illustrated with that heart & updated, 3-5 p.m. May 2 and edited little more on May 3 to [a] restore a few words so that someone in Holland who quoted the first version still has an accurate quote, and [b] to amuse a diacritical friend with the correctly accented " à la mode." Enough: RSS is really silly silliness!)

Blog Reporting Questions: Who Said What and in What Voice?

Fri, 30 Apr 2004 16:31:47 GMT

We started a good discussion at Berkman last night about ways bloggers might give readers more clues about whether they are "doing journalism" or expressing opinions, or quoting someone else's blog, or perhaps writing outright fiction.

If someone is serious about reporting on events and issues, doing it in a separate weblog with a clear statement of purpose would keep things sorted out. Otherwise, having a category label like "Bob's Eyewitness Reports" might be worth a try.

I mentioned at the meeting that different kinds of postings could be flagged with a recognizable graphic and linked to an "about" page that explained the bloggers category system. However, besides flirting with way-too-cuteness, a framework like that might disappear if the blog also circulated as an RSS feed.

Just by reflex, shifting "writing style" is my preferred way of differentiating between kinds of content in this weblog. For example, I started the year playing journalist with a blog entry written in a newspaper style, even avoiding the first person with the awkward construction "this blogger." In contrast, an item about helping teach a class came out more like a personal letter. (Actually, some of my postings here start out as letters to one or more friends, then get pasted into the weblog. Sometimes the glue shows around the edges.)

I'll have to browse through some of my other blog entries to see if I've ever taken a more "editorial commentary" tone. If I have, I suspect the difference would be obvious. More often, I'm afraid my postings here read like a cross between lecture notes and the ramblings of a walking case study in information overload.

Some of the blogging tools folks at the Berkman meetings use handle the "who said what?" question visually, nicely setting off quoted or syndicated text, as in Shimon's frassle site or Jay's makeoutcity.

For the average blogger right now probably stops with the choice of one downloadable blogging tool or another. Radio Userland's news aggregator, which I use for this site, offers a simple mark-up: It picks up RSS-syndicated news items, puts the linked name of an original source in square brackets at the end of the quoted text, and tops it with a headline linked to the original news item. However, the structure gets confusing in longer blog entries that quote other blog entries that, in turn, may quote and link to another news or blog site.

Ideally, there would be both visual and "meta" information in the RSS itself to indicate such a cascade of fragmented syndicated quoting. I've been reading about the underlying issues since some of Ted Nelson's early writing about "transclusion" in Literary Machines almost 20 years ago. On the more practical level, I'm just starting to learn what goes on behind the scenes in my own RSS syndication feeds.

I'm certainly not ready to tackle the whole "semantic web" future-of-everything-online metadata topic. I haven't even had much luck coming up with a "category" system to sort out my own weblog postings, although Radio Userland does allow me to group items into categories, even identifying one item as belonging to more than one category, or presenting a category so that it looks like a separate weblog. (And, yes, my writing this mini-essay fits in that category. It began as a simple posting of the three aggregator items at the bottom of this page.)

Back to just writing clearly: Sometimes, to mention an "aggregator" item or emphasize a point in it, I copy the feed text, shift into the third person and talk about the original source, inserting quotation marks for verbatim parts. When I don't have time to add comments, I indent verbatim passages from the aggregator, but keep the Radio mark-up and links. I've also experimented with changing text or background colors, which only takes a mouse click, but that distinction would all be lost to readers using RSS aggregators. (In fact, changing weblog templates this week may have made some older posts hard to read as Web pages.)

Here are examples of both techniques. They are also items that might be of interest to online journalism bloggers -- I wonder whether the project mentioned in the first item could be used to study the phenomenon mentioned in the second. Hmm. The third (BBC) item reminds me of online sites that encourage readers to contribute personal messages, descriptions and pictures during disasters, including storms in North Carolina. As "unmediated" notes, the practice raises questions about fact-checking and decision-making, which an organization like the BBC should have the staff to handle.

Distributively studying the net to improve it: NETI@home.
A group of Georgia Institute of Technology computer scientists are launching a collaborative, distributed computing project to better understand information flows in the internet. NETI@home works on users' machines, tracking and assessing internet connection and traffic patterns. The project team vows to protect users' privacy when they run the downloadable software. [NITLE Tech News]

Will RSS Readers Clog the Web?. Sure, news aggregators are handy tools, making Web surfing a breeze. But the programs are greedy little buggers that swamp websites with unwanted traffic. Something has to change, and soon. By Ryan Singel. [Wired News]

Readers as Reporters at the BBC.
The blog called [unmediated] reports about BBC News asking its readers for help on a breaking news story. (Shots were being heard in Damascus.) Five reader comments and a much more detailed article were on the site when [unmediated] blogged about it: "It is not disclosed how many people have sent in comments and how much editing and fact checking was done by BBC News before publishing. However, this looks like a clever way to dress up your coverage even from far-away places and to involve your readers beyond letting them criticize the results of your brainwork."

So many things I'd like to read, online and off

Thu, 29 Apr 2004 18:23:51 GMT

This is a two-part experiment in using my new weblog page templates and doing something unorthodox with the RSS news aggregator feature of my Radio Userland software.

The software is designed to let me "post" a linked summary of one story at a time from the dozens of stories that are delivered by my 31 RSS feeds every day, including news from the New York Times, Investigative Reporters and Editors, Wired magazine, various weblogs (especially SmartMobs), and more. I've been testing a batch of RSS-reading programs (a real research project, not just an A.D.D. activity), which has meant subscribing to more feeds than any sane person. Meanwhile, I've been away from the weblog for a week and things are piling up.

Using Radio the way it was designed, posting one "syndicated" item at a time, is a tedious process: Go to the aggregator page; pick a story; click "post"; wait while the news summary is transferred to the editing page; add a note or comment (optional) about the news item; click post; return to the aggregator page...

Instead, today I skimmed my aggregator page with its 100+ items, deleted the ones I wasn't interested in, and left the others on screen. Then, because I do know a little about the markup code behind the Radio aggregator page, I copied the whole thing to a code editor. I deleted most of the formatting and technical parts of the page, including the "Post" buttons and check boxes, and pasted the rest of the code below this paragraph.

Result: An almost-instant "to read"list to add to my other "to do" lists.

(Although it did take some editing of HTML source code to grab all of these links at once, that didn't take as long as reading the actual articles and books listed. Honest.)

All of these items are from the linked sources, taken verbatim from their RSS feeds. Some of the links may not work until I get around to inspecting the code again, but I will put off that part of the learning experience until later.

New York Times: Books, 4/29/04; 1:19:14 PM.

Clinton Becomes a Faster Writer to Avoid Taking Ink From Kerry. To the relief of some of his fellow Democrats, former President Bill Clinton has finished his memoir, or at least enough of it to schedule its release. By David D. Kirkpatrick.

Defenders of Christianity Rebut 'The Da Vinci Code'. Word that Ron Howard is making a movie of the book has increased the intensity of rebuttals from churches and Bible scholars. By Laurie Goodstein.

Dad's Double Life as Journalist and New Deal Booster. Michael Janeway has written a strange, affecting book that is a bittersweet family memoir and a fresh interpretation of the New Deal. By Christopher Caldwell.

A Tale of Ireland Forever, or at Least 1,100 Years. Edward Rutherfurd says his best-selling novel "The Princes of Ireland" is in "a curious region between fiction and nonfiction." By Mel Gussow.

'Plan of Attack': The Shot Heard Round Washington. Bob Woodward's book lives up to the hype, offering by far the most intimate glimpse we have been granted of the secretive Bush White House. By Ted Widmer.

Practicing the Liberty He Preaches. Lawrence Lessig, who wants to make intellectual property more widely available, is offering his new book online at no charge. By Thomas D. Sullivan.

Sexy and Battery-Operated, She's Too Good to Be True. In Thomas Berger's novel, a theme-park technician whose forte is animatronic orangutans creates a fake bride. By Janet Maslin.

Yahoo! News - Most Emailed, 4/29/04; 12:19:00 PM.

New 'Dr. Who' Investigates Dark Side of Time Travel (Reuters). Reuters - Cult British sci-fi series "Dr. Who" is to get an edgy new Doctor in Christopher Eccleston who hopes to portray the time-traveler's "melancholy side" as he drifts through time and space.

New York Times: NYT HomePage, 4/29/04; 11:19:32 AM.

Answer, but No Cure, for a Social Disorder That Isolates Many. Thousands of adults who have never fit in socially are only now stumbling across a neurological explanation for their struggles. By Amy Harmon.

Jon's Radio, 4/29/04; 11:19:19 AM.

David Weinberger's excellent rant. C-SPAN captured David Weinberger's excellent rant yesterday at the Technology and Politics Summit in DC. The stream was overloaded last I checked, but I captured a clip (WinMedia, QuickTime). The corresponding segment of the stream, when it becomes available, is here. It's the part where he talks about how networked markets erode the power of conventional marketing, empower the customer, and transform the business of product evaluation. ...

Extra! Extra!, 4/29/04; 9:59:48 AM.

Calendars reveal chancellors' priorities. John Frank of The Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina used the chancellor's weekly calendars obtained through records requests to determine "the number of times Chancellor James Moeser met with certain groups or spent his time on...

Boston workers cash in $12 million worth of sick time. Ric Kahn of The Boston Globe, with assistance from Matt Carroll, Meredith Goldstein, Douglas Belkin, and Emily Shartin, reviewed municipal records to find that "from July 2002 through June 2003, the last fiscal year, 159 cities and towns in Greater...

BBC News | Technology | World Edition, 4/29/04; 9:31:45 AM.

Spying software watches you work. Spyware is rampant on computers in US businesses, a survey has found.

PC helps map ancient Rome. Computer technology is helping piece together a fragmented stone map of ancient Rome.

dotJournalism, 4/29/04; 9:31:38 AM.

Lucky escape for BBC Online. Government review set to exonerate public service website, claims UK newspaper

Smart Mobs, 4/29/04; 9:31:37 AM.

Washington wakes up to spyware.

Canning spam is no longer the biggest Internet concern of lawmakers. Two current bills in Congress seek to regulate the programs that take personal information and deliver pop-up ads. Spycheckers definitions for spyware and adware
full article on CNET news

WiFiMapping.

WiFiMaps displays information about WiFi availability through the Web. Users may look for nets by zip code (US), MAC address, SSID, or state. Some of the data was discovered by wardriving, while other data has been uploaded by users. Results include (of course) maps.
(thanks to Drew from Zhrodague)

Smartmobbing PR blog.

Steve Rubel's Micro Persuasion blogs on "the impact of Weblogs and participatory journalism on the public relations industry."

Legoland panopticon for kids.

At a European Legoland, Lego has deployed a mobile tracking service for kids. Children wear bracelets with WiFi and SMS built in, so they (or their devices) can be located and txted by anxious, separated parents.
Kidspotter and Bluesoft built the device. (thanks to Jim)

CHI tutorial on sociology and cybercollective action.

In Vienna, Marc Smith and Susan Herring are teaching a CHI 2004 tutorial on recent sociological work on computer-mediated collective action. This includes a session on Analyzing Social Interaction in CMC Systems.

Panel: Living with the Genie.

Smart Mobbers in the Bay Area make note: Howard will be sitting on a fantastic panel later this week, a discussion of the book Living with the Genie: On Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery. Sponsored by the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, the event will take place this Thursday, April 29, 2004, at 7:00 p.m. in Pimental Hall on the UC Berkeley campus. Don't be discouraged if you don't live near Berkeley, the entire program will be webcast simultaneously. Web listeners will be able to email their questions to the panel for the Q&A segment. Should be a stimulating evening, given the assemblage of great minds.

Wired News, 4/29/04; 9:31:26 AM.

God, Send a Realistic Tech Flick. The film Godsend arrives at a time when the politics and science of cloning remain unresolved. Will the movie help bury U.S. cloning efforts for good? By Kristen Philipkoski.

Green Tea Good for Hard Drives. The same tannins in green tea that cause stains to form on your mugs and teapots could save the hard-drive manufacturing industry some serious dough, says a team of researchers. By Amit Asaravala.

Dan Gillmor's eJournal, 4/29/04; 9:31:16 AM.

Another PR Person Looking at Personal Journalism.

Steve Rubel has a new blog, Micro Persuasion, "on how blogs and participatory journalism are impacting the practice of public relations."

Newspaper Calls Gambling What It Is.

Not once in this LA Times story (reg req) about Native American casinos' gambling revenues -- and whether the casinos should pay more to the state -- do you find the word "gaming," I'm happy to note. The gambling industry has tried to sanitize what it does by renaming the activity into something that sounds totally benign. And the media usually plays along. Not this time. A tip of the hat to whoever made that decision.

Educational Technology, 4/29/04; 9:31:12 AM.

New and Networthy Presentation Apps - Jeffrey Branzburg, techLearning. Love it or hate it, presentation software has found a hallowed place on many an educator's desktop. Indeed, Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, and Sunburst HyperStudio slide shows have become common sights in classrooms and conference rooms everywher

Harnessing the power of technology for learning - Converge. Today's schools have an opportunity to make a fundamental shift in their use of technology and to leverage it as a powerful tool for student learning. That conclusion is one of the findings in the final report of the BellSouth edu.pwr(3) initiative, re

Community Technology Centers' Network. Community Technology Centers' Network (CTCNet) is committed to the goal of creating "a society in which all people are equitably empowered by technology skills and usage." CTCNet brings together agencies and programs that provide computer exploration