RSS Killed the Blog Star

mrG — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 13:08:01 -0400

Got a call last week from Matt Hicks, a senior writer at eWeek.com. Matt has since released an executive-summary story about the immanent meltdown of the Internet under the strain of RSS and wanted to talk about my experiences -- unaware of the Wired story, Matt's interest was sparked by the Big Corporate angle exposed by news of Microsoft clamping their RSS to teaser excerpts in an attempt to stem the bit flood due to alledgedly over-zealous aggregators.

The story out of Redmond is on their providing a full-text composite feed for all the MSDN blog postings, which most likely means the average consumer of the feed was really reading only a tiny fraction of the total. They'd done as I'd done and trimmed the RSS, but in doing so incurred the wrath of those who don't want just an alert to changed content, but who want that integrated infospace of woven webservices with the full items all under one roof, their roof.

Microsoft rescinded and upped the limit to only trim multi-K posts, but the issue remained, what are we going to do about RSS now that the covered wagons have come? Microsoft technical evangelist Robert Scoble decided the problem was with the polling frequencies ...

"RSS is broken. It's not scalable when tens of thousands of people start subscribing to thousands of separate RSS feeds and start pulling down those feeds every few minutes...Clearly, RSS is losing some of its advantages. More and more sites are not providing full-text feeds."

His solution is a co-ordinated en masse adoption of on-demand polling that only hits your list of 10,000 subscribed feeds when you open your aggregator -- and I wish him good luck with that one considering we can't even get developer consensus on a sane implementation of RFC 2616.

Mind you, breaking my Conditional GET implementation to conform to the broken masses did help, but it was not a solution. The majority readers don't even try to store Last-Modified between launches and their owners only launch when they have time to read blogs, and I still had a situation where adding just one short paragraph in a brief post would flip the dirty-bit and the next swarm of fans would be pulling nearly as much from my site as they would if they were just grabbing my real page. Yeah, sure, I could, if I was rich enough to own my own server, run with mod_gzip (that I couldn't get working anyway) to gain another order of magnitude's headroom, but I can't, and so I went back to Plan A anyway, trimming the feed, stripping the HTML, teledyn-lite as merely your remote-access notice that I'd said something new.

And therein the latest Great Idea in webservices. As Yoda said, there is another hope, and the key to this new GI is what I just said there, that my adding one small part invalidates the whole mass of it ...

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RSS Killed the Blog Star