RE: [RSS-DEV] RSS for Everyone

["Danny Ayers" <danny666@virgilio.it>]

> To increase adoption, I think a few things need to happen.  Users need
> to know about aggregators.  The only print article I have seen was in
> some linux magazine.  How about "the economist" or some maintream
> business magazine?  Most people who are not computer scientists take
> some form of computer training at university or college.  Convincing
> universities to include rss aggregation and syndication in these courses
> and in marketing business courses would help.

Just for the record, I believe Ben Hammersley's piece for the Guardian also
went in the print edition (a mass circulation paper, though this would be in
a special-interest section) :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,781838,00.html

While looking for a link to that, I found another piece in the same paper :

http://www.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,3605,333821,00.html

> I think a big win for RSS will be for organizations to communicate to
> the world in a useful way, small to huge companies.

I agree entirely in regard to it being absolutely a good thing getting these
technologies into computer courses. From personal experience it can be very
difficult to get new systems adopted in academic environments (at least in
the uk), largely due to political conflicts between the people doing the
teaching and the people looking after the systems. In addition, I got the
impression that non-specialist taught courses tended to lag behind the real
world by several years.

On the positive side, once someone's used an aggregator (or blogging tool,
for that matter) the benefits are apparent, and if they're an educator then
this will get passed on. So I suspect it's only really a matter of time
before client-side aggregators become as ubiqitous as browsers, and more
server-side systems along the lines of Google news come online (though the
nature of both will probably mutate in the process).

[snipped on the need for tutorials : +1]

> Paths in a file system may dissappear as metadata based file systems
> emerge (Microsoft is working on one) in preference of queries with
> predicates, and asking for items which match a query instead of being on
> a certain "channel" seems like an analagous idea (daypop does this as a
> simple example).

Agreed 100% (though I wasn't aware of ongoing work at MS). The simple
ability to have the same item in several different folders is a big step
forward. Unfortunately XML has probably had a detrimental effect on this
idea, as the predominantly (single-)hierarchical 'outline' kind of approach
leans towards trees rather than more general graphs. The way RDF subtly
shifts the emphasis from locators to identifiers is IMHO full of potential
(which of course I intend to exploit in my apps ;-)

There's been some related work done at Xerox Parc 'Placeless Documents' :

 http://www2.parc.com/csl/projects/placeless/

Cheers,
Danny