Echos of RSS

mrG — Tue, 01 Jul 2003 08:23:51 -0400

The debates are way past heating up. Ben and Mena have put out for a call on a long list of extensions to the idea RSS, although I thought the whole idea of RSS was that it was extensible, and Davey, already down about the whole "Google Bar business": has taken his bat and ball and gone home to mama, which is probably just as well, the poor deer thing caught up in the headlights of life as he is, beaten up just 'cause he's an -- well let's not go there.

Then again, maybe Davey's just all depressed from hanging around rich law students too much -- let me tell you this: if I had a precarious heart condition, I think I'd choose a beach in Jamaica long before I chose hanging around getting jaded with Ivy League Lawyers, but I digress ...

So what's the big deal really? It's being floated up the pole that RSS is dead and bucking every known tradition, they want to supplant it with something that has a name instead of a TLA. That alone is boding badness, but then, they have a technology that lay-people (read "teachers") have only just in the past two years started to comprehend and roll out into the fray in vast quantities squeezed out of their precious, nay mendicant budget allocations (not to mention executive approval); now they want to dump all that for Echo? The Pro-Echos, with the best of intentions, want to take a scarce resource like free-software RSS coders and split them with not just a version fork, but a diversion of the mains off into an entirely new technology that does more or less the same thing?

Basically, I agree with Winer

I can't believe I said that, but he's got a point. We don't need Echo unless there's something catestrophically wrong with RSS, and all this initiative is doing now is frightening off any further development on semantic-web, learning units and other RSS-based off-the-wall hippie ideas that young and innovative people are bringing to the funding table. To split it now, in a down and dark market, is foolish and, well, a little irresponsible. If there is a real engineering complaint, if RSS is plummeting the net into certain disaster, then no one has clearly articulated this because, given ETag and If-Modified-Since capabilities, I just don't see any real need to go forking the metadata-sharing developer community right now.

Of course, I'm not Ben and Mena or Sam or anyone with a stake in the game. Let's be real clear about that. It's not my software to say one way or the other where they should go, but I just don't see it -- and vision is all I'm offering. We can't even get people to agree on one set of basic browser CSS capabilities, and because people don't change until it's to avoid catastrophe, I don't see all these millions of RSS services saying to themselves, "Gee, ok, sounds good to me, I'll just take a few weeks off my day job and start converting everything over."

No sir, it's going to be a mess that persists for years and years. I mean, look at it now: We can't even obsolesce RSS 0.9 in favour of 0.91, and it's been what, 7 or 8 years since Netscape's Netcenter? Far from simplifying the situation, we'll only end up complicating the current cesspool by the additional complexity of this simpler Echo alternative -- plus the test for it's presence. All we accomplish is adding yet another w3c-style chicklet to the already daunting list of RSS (0.9, 0.91, 1.0), RDF (1 or 2) and a bunch of others that I don't even follow anymore.

I've tuned them out because I really don't care. When I see a long row of chicklets, when my RSS-discovery bookmarklet gives me a choice of 5 feed flavours, 9 times out of ten, I take the lowest common denominator, RSS 0.9, because I know it's going to work with all my RSS software. I also know it will give me what I basically need, a time-ordered list of headlines, maybe with abstracts. The rest is nice to have, but the risk goes way up and, well, I just don't have time anymore to be debugging for hours just to discover some aggregator's Python libraries can't handle some quirk of a namespace. Someday, maybe, likely the day when I can use CSS to layout three columns and not be worried about offending somebody.

We're asking the wrong questions.

Not that anyone is going to listen to your woodland correspondent here, but frankly, richer metadata and internationalization are really nice warm fuzzy good things, but they are not the real issue with RSS, not now anyway. A far more urgent issue is what you see when you use Technorati or any of the other RSS-based blog sifters -- you get noise caused by feedback loops. We're not going rid the web of feedback points where RSS is put back into the stream (e.g. by displaying Technorati results in your sidebar), but maybe there's opportunity, within the current RSS 1.0 spec even, to use those loops.

Why abandon all this cool (aka "expensive and pointless") metadata bickering? Because, let's face it, blogs are hot, blogging support will attract funding, and as the noise levels in the current blog-sifters show, there's excellent knowledge in blogs if only we had the tools to extract it.

What sort of tools? Relevance and reputation based feeds and aggregators for one. The problem of quickly finding what's good from among the great muck of the blogosphere is, if you ask me, a far more urgent problem than seeing the correct authorship or harmonizing dc:date and pubDate before I even read the thing.

Ok, here's how it works: Taking my cue from Rael Dornfest's Peerkat, I facilitate P2P trading of RSS from desktop to desktop as well as server to desktop -- you subscribe to 1000 feeds, aggregate them, rate them (explicitly or by statistical filtering based on past use patterns) and then rebroadcast your new rated feed. Aggregators could then /use/ redundant items from feedback loops because each RSS source has a reputation rating that weights the contained individual item ranking; repeated items add their rankings. (and before David Weinberger asks, sure, why not allow for negative rankings)

Towards a distributed, human-edited blogsearch

The trick is to make it painlessly easy to rank your personal aggregated RSS items. Either explicitly or through your actions, you give it a weight, maybe by re-ordering and pruning your aggregated list, maybe by some side-bar metric slider control (need some R&D), whatever. Then your new RSS (plural) is picked up by friends who (in varying degrees, perhaps also statistically tracked and rated) respect your ability to sift the web -- they'd link to your RSS, and in a recursive RSS fashion, they'd also be rating you and exporting their RSS list of recommenders. Since each input has a rank, the aggregator making sense of it all could do a far better job of weeding the chaff and rounding up the usual suspects.

This is also RSS version-tolerant: If you broadcast only 0.91 or omit the relevance namespace extensions, I can just give a blanket score to everything you send me (you give an implicit weight of 100% to all items, or 0% to anything you deleted). If you play nice (include the namespace for item ranking), then we have the makings of a real-time human-edited relevance and reputation ranked search engine across blogspace.

Making it so easy people would actually do the rankings, aye there's the rub. It has to be as easy and convenient as adding a bookmark -- I think Rael had the right idea with Peerkat's admin, but the interface was something only a geed would love, and since the network of Peerkats never emerged, no one had any reason at all to explore the idea. Perhaps an option is like the MozBlog or JabberZilla side-bar XUL extensions to Mozilla (I'm sure we can find a solution to embed a similar extension into MSIE ... er Win04).

However it appears, and where ever, it's got to be seamless, it has to be more seamless than the current crop of browser Usenet readers because it otherwise doesn't get used and it has to be used to make it work (and also needs to work to get used). The interface has to solve the basic question of "What's happening now?" and then let me check off "Share this" or "This is <u>really</u> good."

Now maybe someone can tell me (because I haven't the time to follow Sam's Wiki), I understand that maybe it might make life easier if some global Draconian government mandated it's exclusive use overnight, but in real practical terms what in all this plan of mine requires retooling the whole international web to use Echo? And then, if Echo is nothing more than additional capabilities added to RSS, what is there about Echo that would be so new as to be outside such a system?

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Echos of RSS