Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor's eJournal - RSS Hitting Critical Mass
If you are completely new to RSS, which most people are, it is gaining a lot of steam lately because it offers a way to use the Internet without a browser and without email.
I've posted a couple of things that attempted to explain RSS in simple terms and why it's getting popular- if you're interested.
Dan Gillmor does a good job (as usual) in this article about RSS hitting critical mass. Here are some quotes I liked...
"RSS is evolving as a replacement for e-mail publishing and marketing," he says. "RSS suddenly makes the Internet work the way it should. Instead of you searching for everything, the Internet comes to you on your terms."
David Sifry, who runs Technorati provides some far-out possibilities.
"How about getting an alert whenever your backyard motion sensor goes off?" he wonders. "That's easy. But what about combining that with the feeds from the other cameras in your neighborhood, taken at the same time? How about taking the aggregate information from traffic cameras, published to the Web, to be able to more effectively calculate and predict traffic flow during rush hour? How about entirely new industrial applications made possible because the sensors are all describing information in the same format?"
Like I've written before, when I first heard about RSS it seemed like such a fringe technology that may only have a small geek following. Now though, I'm anxious to see where it heads- I really think it could be a very useful tool for managing information, once it's more standardized and stable. Here are Dan's final words...
This is exciting stuff. And the news is just starting to be written.
Via: PaidContent.org