Forbes.com: The Coming RSS Revolution:
Lately, news Web sites and those of online diarists have discovered the joys of syndication and publishing RSS feeds, and this makes the act of keeping track of them much easier for readers.
Take for example, the growing popularity of desktop RSS reader software. We’ve been using NetNewsWire on an Apple Computer (nasdaq: AAPL – news – people ) Macintosh for the past several weeks and have come away thinking there may be a future in this RSS thing.
This article is more a plug for NetNewsWire (not that there’s anything wrong with that) than RSS, but that’s part of the story. Without end-users applications to deal with RSS, it might as well not exist. That’s part of the weirdness for me about CNN’s non-existent RSS feed. In late 1999, I had no idea that RSS was going to become something everyone could use: I was more interested in managing the various screenscraping robots I was seeing.
As it turns out, NetNewsWire’s sites drawer shows a few news organizations that “get it.” Here’s some background on one that doesn’t . . . .
In 1999, CNN.com and all the other related websites were using the InfoSeek search engine, and its care and feeding was my responsibility. To facilitate accurate and timely indexing, the guy who invented it devised a file format that allowed site managers to add and delete files from the index. Since we updated this file every hour to keep the index fresh, it made sense to use it to populate the Rich Site Summary list. When I started seeing crawlers from moreover, etc., wandering all over the place, I called up their folks and offered to put up one of these new-fangled RSS feeds for them.
Now, of course, in the intervening time InfoSeek has fallen off the map at CNN: they use Google now. The sitelist file was being generated right up until September 11, 2001, but with the need to move resources around to cope with demand, some part of it broke, taking the RSS generator with it.
Why this tedious trip down memory lane? Well, I think the reasons for having an RSS feed still exist: really simple syndication makes sense as a way of keeping your product in front of people as their ways of getting news change. Also, if your competitors have and you don’t, why? In the case of a CNN, it’s a safe bet that people have bookmarked the site or at least don’t find typing CNN.com into their browser window *too* time-consuming. But what if they use an RSS client as their first-stop for news?
The other aspect is news organizations managing the presentation of their own content. It strikes me as odd that CNN, at least the place I remember, would not try to publish its own feeds to ensure their content isn’t being syndicated by anyone else. There’s nothing preventing someone from screenscraping CNN and adding their own emphasis to or even removing articles from the feed. I link to a guy who offers unedited feeds, in response to all the queries I get (14 today, 12,000 since this site was launched).
It’s better to have an authoritative feed than to cede that to anyone else. If all we want is the wire service story, Google’s news service can do that. We go to this site or that to get a certain presentation of the news, not “just the facts.” We expect news providers to help connect facts together, to ask the questions we would ask, to inform us. I’m not sure that kind of disintermediation is helpful.