manalang

Mena Trott’s (co-founder/creator of Moveable Type) post on Six Log today points to a movement to come up with a new syndication format that hopes to overcome the shortcomings of RSS. RSS has a long and somewhat embarrassing history (Mark Pilgrim has been writing about RSS quite a bit for a while now… lots of good posts at his website).

I haven’t followed the movement in the RSS community in a while. My first encounter with it was back in 1999 when I was working on a project to implement an enterprise portal. We needed content to populate the portal with so we looked to the internet for free syndicated content we could use just to have external news to supplement boring business content. Back then, Netscape had just introduced support for RSS 0.92 with their portal. There was also a site called XML Tree (which doesn’t look like it’s around any more) that was a directory for RSS content. Moreover was just starting to get known at that point and a company called Screaming Media (looks like they got bought) was just a thought in the head of the late Jay Chiat (of Chiat/Day advertising).

After several years, I’m back to looking at the RSS movement… thanks to blogging (I’m a late bloomer-blogger). This new syndication format that Sam Ruby is spear-heading sounds very promising. The best part about it is it’s going to be tailored to the blogging community. Support for it at this early stage is also very positive. I can’t wait until we start seeing uses of this!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2003 at 8:45 AM PDT and is tagged with blogging, programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.