One On OneOct24

Brooks Jordan 0 comments

If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.

- Aristotle

Blogger Daniel Eran wrote a wonderfully succinct history of RSS in 2005, which I found on the wikipedia page on RSS.

Here's what I took from it:

The basic idea of RSS is to distill the core content of a site and deliver it as raw data, devoid of presentation, in a structured file.

While every website looks, behaves and is organized differently, they can all publish an identically formatted XML file that contains a description of the site's content, with embedded information on the publisher, when it was posted, and links to find the content on the site.

What I observe in this beginning is that RSS provided a method to move websites, at least the core content, instantly across the Web. I think based on the popularity of RSS in this early stage of adoption that one can now say it made the Web more of what people naturally expect it to be: fluid and much more workable than websites can be, certainly than the were in the mid-1990s. So, good start.

But what about how it's developing?

I think it's still early to tell, but I think the most interesting characteristic that I see developing is the ability for RSS to go beyond connecting data to a single person (e.g., NYTimes politics section to my feed reader) to connecting organizations to a single person, and, best, just one person to another person. What I mean is that a feed tends toward an ownership of one on the recipient side, even more than email, although at first that's counter-intuitive because in the case of email you actually have an email address that you know is linked to an actual human being, because it's a hand-raising, choice-making, intention-setting activity to choose your feed and the items within it.

With email there is just the one, too, but it is the passive one rather than the active one. With a feed there's no two ways about it - it's your feed and you choose what's in it.

And I would say that same tendency - toward the one - is active on the publishing side of the feed, too. Why? Because isn't the best way to get and keep someone's attention to speak to them directly in a way that specifically engages or inspires? Nothing has been invented yet that can do that better than me talking to you, if the context is right and so are delivery and timing.

So we're going to continue to see all kinds of personalization in feeds, from contextual ads within the feed to custom and thematic feeds to functionality (e.g., "Subscribe") within the feed. But the flowering of feeds will occur when they're used to facilitate a back and forth discussion between two people.