Re: Introducing myself

["james@xmlTree.com" <james@xxxxxxx.xxxx]

Bas

> I'm still unexperienced with all the emerging technologies (xmlnews, ICE, RDF,
> OCS, RSS, to name a few); it is pretty overwhelming at this stage.

My tupenny's worth:

RSS is winning (in terms of visible number of content publishers, and definitely in terms
of content consumers), because it has a critical mass.  What is this critical mass? People
are building an infrastructure around it.

e.g.

Portals using RSS : http://my.netscape.com, http://www.mywebnews.com/default.asp,
http://my.userland.com/, http://theweb.startshere.net/,
http://myhome.mystuff.net/myweblog.cgi

Headline viewers using RSS : http://www.vertexdev.com/HeadlineViewer/,
http://www.sarna.net/newswire/

Forums using RSS: http://network54.com

Email delivery using RSS : http://www.xmltree.com/

Directory of (mostly) RSS  - about 1200 channels : http://www.xmltree.com/Index.cfm?Cat=N

Software - RSSMaker, various other scrapers, RSS::Perl, many stylesheets, and so on.  If
I've missed any, or anyone knows the URLs for these, please contact me.  We're setting up
a RSS channel where people can publicise RSS resources.

David Mundie and I argue over how 'good' RSS is.  'Goodness' doesn't matter.  If you're a
content consumer, using one of these portals, you probably don't care what the format is.
But if you're a publisher, you want your content to reach as many eyeballs as possible.
My.Netscape alone probably has millions of users, and My.Userland has thousands. This is
what persuaded Moreover (150 news channels) to use RSS for their external syndication,
instead of their own proprietary format.

What excites me about RSS is the way in which publishers are publishing without knowing
what delivery mechanism will be used - the content creation and consumption processes are
completely decoupled.  The other formats (ICE, XMLNews etc.) certainly offer something for
limited, well resourced syndication schemes - like between the major newspapers.  But I
can't see them being used in the mass market, and the only software that handles them out
of the box costs 4 figures at least.

Best regards,
James Carlyle

james@xmltree.com
www.xmltree.com - directory of XML content on the web