The RSS Remix Economy
"Ziggy (departing CEO of Australia's number 1 telco - Telstra) is guided by his children when it comes to picking future trends, and RSS is the game for the Moment... RSS allows you to play the news editor, and somewhere in there Ziggy thinks there is a bankable model to work on. AFR June 18, 05"
Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary is now utilised by the majority of US websites, as a means of increasing traffic to their services - Namely through repeat traffic. Websites need to code their site into RSS format (a form of XML) which can take anything from 5 minutes to 3 hours on average and users then view any updates from the website (usually headline, teaser or full text and images) through one interface, provided in a desktop or web application by Newsgator, Feedtagger (as well as MyYahoo - although if you are Australian you need to say you live in Beverly Hills 90210) The end result for the publisher or website owner is more eyeballs and more advertising revenue, in theory.
Some website editors though have begin to become as paranoid as print publishers are about the web. Matt McAllister, online editor of Infoworld said : "I started thinking a frightening thought: RSS is doing to the Web today what the Web has been doing to print for the last several years. We have disintermediated our Web site by offering our news in an easier to access format...again. Just as the Web ultimately created more opportunity rather than less, RSS will open up some new doors for the media business."
RSS also has the search engines and convergent telco/yellowpages business worried, and internally acting as if 'the best form of defense is offense' : When Sensis or Google aim to be 'the first contact point for commercial and social search and communication' RSS is now the default home page for millions of 'Web 2.0' internet consumers. Yahoo's 'MyYahoo', Google's ineffective Personalised Home Page, Microsoft's not so secret start.com RSS alpha, and AOL's MyAOL, are the latest attempts at 'Personalisation' - bringing the internet i want, with the information i need, to the device i use when i decide.'
RSS is absolutely different to Netscape or Pointcast; Netscape was merely a browser, which never became a 'portal' play as much as they tried. Pointcast allowed you to subscribe to a limited range of 'Premium' content providers, a synonym for useless offline content like 'weather' 'sports' and 'finance' which no-one got any value from because it was everywhere : In the morning newspapers, on the front page of every portal, and not specialised at all to my interest.
I worked for Microsoft/nineMSN in the mid-90's in which personalisation meant having a 'start' page in which you could select your star signs, city you lived in (for the weather), set-up a stock watchlist, and choose general channels of content (sports, news, finance, sports etc) Not much pre-RSS had changed at Yahoo, MSN etc and to this day you can get a daily astrology report, stock update and weather report at the start page of most portals once you are registered.
In the early 2000's other parallel trends of information and spam overload were occurring : Meta-News services, such as Deja-News - bought by Google, Yahoo News, and eventually Topix, as well as free classifieds services such as Craigslist began to become popular. In the early 2000's blogging also started its hyper-growth through services such as Movable Type and Blogger, in which people could set-up their own page on the Internet without knowing HTML and link to, plus comment on stories of the day.
Before long there was tens of millions of blogs, thousands of news services, a bevy of search engines, and a need for a way for people to keep up to date with all these websites, links, news-updates and god knows what. Using ones memory or the bookmark feature in Internet Explorer (as Netscape had been bought by AOL who did nothing with it - even though ironically their engineer working on MyNetscape in 1999 developed RDF - the first version of what we know as RSS) was not very useful in trying to remember the name of the news source, blog, auction or classified listing. Not many people would visit more than 5-10 sites regularly, largely because they lacked the tools to find and store relevant sites.
At the same time, search engine and email spam, was reaching a huge crescendo. Upstarts such as Newsgator and Bloglines, quickly followed by Yahoo, came along and provided a simple solution for this : RSS; Allow people to subscribe to minute by minute updates to any changes on a site, and view the headline, plus some to all of the content of the page through a desktop application or web based browser. Before long Yahoo News was the number 1 news site ahead of CNN and traditional media was wondering how to get onto the RSS and meta-scraping web services 2.0 ship. In fact, some media companies such as NYTimes have dismissed such dogma and thrived in the RSS world.
The next chapter in the book has been equally fascinating with a range of new services being offered which all offer RSS as as core delivery mechanisms. These include :
1. Wikis (Jotspot, Social Text) - Online websites for project management that dont require HTML experience, and as soon as someone has updated a file within the project team, the RSS reader for each team member is automatically updated.
2. Meta-Classifieds Service (Simply Hired, WorkZoo, Oodle) - These services search all the major classifieds site in a vertical (eg Workzoo) or across all classifieds verticals by city (Oodle) and continually update results into your RSS folder) SimplyHired also has advanced features such as when you are searching all job sites, you can also check through your linkedin profile if you know anyone working at that company.
3. RSS Companies powering Media RSS Solutions : Leaders such as Newsgator are wholesaling to media companies RSS solutions they can repackage to their customers to deliver their content through RSS. Companies like the New York Times, Denver Post, The Guardian Online in UK and Wall Street Journal are all companies with advanced RSS plans.
4. RSS advertising being powered by companies such as Feedburner that provide the 'RSS feed' for over 60,000 websites, is still in early stages, as new technologies and metrics for delivering successful RSS advertising are trialled.
5. Website tagging in which consumers tag websites and stories/links with a self-defined category (eg tag this story 'crap' rss' 'media' 'australia' 'benbarren' 'wanker') These tags can then be viewed by other people and subscribed to through RSS. The net result has been high quality listings based on categories which the users define, without search engine spam, updated in real time. Hello Google :)
6. Venture Capital adds fuel to the fire : Early signs of rapid market consolidation with Bloglines being bought by AskJeeves (who were then bought by Interactive Corp) as well as Newsgator buying Feeddemon, and key leaders in the space such as Newsgator, Feedburner, del.icio.us and Feedster - all raising substantial VC to enable their rapid consolidation (while at the same time Yahoo and Google have been on M+A spending sprees buying 2.0 companies such as flickr, blo.gs, dialpad, dodgeball and many others planned to come) Not to mention podcasting (which also uses the RSS technology) being offered by Apple in their I-Tunes store - which sells 1.2m songs a day : thats another whole post as is the rumoured RSS heavy Google competitor to Itunes - plus a free classifieds service and PayPal banking system : Hello all banks and media companies ;)
7 Enterprise RSS growing, with Newsgator's VP in this space stating that the last year has proven RSS to be "both powerful and versatile, enabling such diverse enterprise functions as corporate communications, sales lead tracking, customer support, brand monitoring, competitive intelligence, project management, HR due diligence, and knowledge management." From speaking to clients every day he sees demand for :
- External public feeds for brand monitoring and competitive awareness
- External premium content from providers like Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, and Thomson Dialog
- Internal and hosted enterprise applications
Within the RSS space, there is also much debate about the role of advertising, free feeds vs subscription, the correct pathway to personalisation, whether an RSS reader should be desktop or web-based, and what the role of blogs and media companies is, in this 'Web 2.0' space.
I can only talk from personal experience, but RSS has made my Internet experience far superior : I now subscribe to specialist writers in the areas I am interested in (Venture Capital, Internet Media, Search, Podcasting, Flat-Bar Bike Riding, LA Sleaze) and read approximately 150 sites 2-3 times a day, with special focus on my favourite 20 sites) I download 5-10 podcasts a day through RSS and listen to them on my Ipod Shuffle when riding my bike, or catching a train.
American RSS companies will be coming to Australia very very soon. Further local RSS technologists, fresh from computer science degrees @ uni, who consider Nirvana a 'historically significant' band have no such neurosis or paranoia about RSS, meta-search technologies and new programming languages such as Ajax, which enable applications like Google's Gmail to closely replicate the benefits of a desktop application without the disadvantages (not being able to log-in thru different devices)
New metaphors for media consumption and software applications, driven by RSS and related technical siblings, will hopefully enable us to lose some of the old business silos we used to define 'newspapers', 'websites', 'search engines' and 'classifieds' - Welcome to the new Remix Culture, as it is called by lawyers, end users and analysts alike. What these services are exactly to be called, I'm not sure, but I know they'll be del.icio.us.
Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary is now utilised by the majority of US websites, as a means of increasing traffic to their services - Namely through repeat traffic. Websites need to code their site into RSS format (a form of XML) which can take anything from 5 minutes to 3 hours on average and users then view any updates from the website (usually headline, teaser or full text and images) through one interface, provided in a desktop or web application by Newsgator, Feedtagger (as well as MyYahoo - although if you are Australian you need to say you live in Beverly Hills 90210) The end result for the publisher or website owner is more eyeballs and more advertising revenue, in theory.
Some website editors though have begin to become as paranoid as print publishers are about the web. Matt McAllister, online editor of Infoworld said : "I started thinking a frightening thought: RSS is doing to the Web today what the Web has been doing to print for the last several years. We have disintermediated our Web site by offering our news in an easier to access format...again. Just as the Web ultimately created more opportunity rather than less, RSS will open up some new doors for the media business."
RSS also has the search engines and convergent telco/yellowpages business worried, and internally acting as if 'the best form of defense is offense' : When Sensis or Google aim to be 'the first contact point for commercial and social search and communication' RSS is now the default home page for millions of 'Web 2.0' internet consumers. Yahoo's 'MyYahoo', Google's ineffective Personalised Home Page, Microsoft's not so secret start.com RSS alpha, and AOL's MyAOL, are the latest attempts at 'Personalisation' - bringing the internet i want, with the information i need, to the device i use when i decide.'
RSS is absolutely different to Netscape or Pointcast; Netscape was merely a browser, which never became a 'portal' play as much as they tried. Pointcast allowed you to subscribe to a limited range of 'Premium' content providers, a synonym for useless offline content like 'weather' 'sports' and 'finance' which no-one got any value from because it was everywhere : In the morning newspapers, on the front page of every portal, and not specialised at all to my interest.
I worked for Microsoft/nineMSN in the mid-90's in which personalisation meant having a 'start' page in which you could select your star signs, city you lived in (for the weather), set-up a stock watchlist, and choose general channels of content (sports, news, finance, sports etc) Not much pre-RSS had changed at Yahoo, MSN etc and to this day you can get a daily astrology report, stock update and weather report at the start page of most portals once you are registered.
In the early 2000's other parallel trends of information and spam overload were occurring : Meta-News services, such as Deja-News - bought by Google, Yahoo News, and eventually Topix, as well as free classifieds services such as Craigslist began to become popular. In the early 2000's blogging also started its hyper-growth through services such as Movable Type and Blogger, in which people could set-up their own page on the Internet without knowing HTML and link to, plus comment on stories of the day.
Before long there was tens of millions of blogs, thousands of news services, a bevy of search engines, and a need for a way for people to keep up to date with all these websites, links, news-updates and god knows what. Using ones memory or the bookmark feature in Internet Explorer (as Netscape had been bought by AOL who did nothing with it - even though ironically their engineer working on MyNetscape in 1999 developed RDF - the first version of what we know as RSS) was not very useful in trying to remember the name of the news source, blog, auction or classified listing. Not many people would visit more than 5-10 sites regularly, largely because they lacked the tools to find and store relevant sites.
At the same time, search engine and email spam, was reaching a huge crescendo. Upstarts such as Newsgator and Bloglines, quickly followed by Yahoo, came along and provided a simple solution for this : RSS; Allow people to subscribe to minute by minute updates to any changes on a site, and view the headline, plus some to all of the content of the page through a desktop application or web based browser. Before long Yahoo News was the number 1 news site ahead of CNN and traditional media was wondering how to get onto the RSS and meta-scraping web services 2.0 ship. In fact, some media companies such as NYTimes have dismissed such dogma and thrived in the RSS world.
The next chapter in the book has been equally fascinating with a range of new services being offered which all offer RSS as as core delivery mechanisms. These include :
1. Wikis (Jotspot, Social Text) - Online websites for project management that dont require HTML experience, and as soon as someone has updated a file within the project team, the RSS reader for each team member is automatically updated.
2. Meta-Classifieds Service (Simply Hired, WorkZoo, Oodle) - These services search all the major classifieds site in a vertical (eg Workzoo) or across all classifieds verticals by city (Oodle) and continually update results into your RSS folder) SimplyHired also has advanced features such as when you are searching all job sites, you can also check through your linkedin profile if you know anyone working at that company.
3. RSS Companies powering Media RSS Solutions : Leaders such as Newsgator are wholesaling to media companies RSS solutions they can repackage to their customers to deliver their content through RSS. Companies like the New York Times, Denver Post, The Guardian Online in UK and Wall Street Journal are all companies with advanced RSS plans.
4. RSS advertising being powered by companies such as Feedburner that provide the 'RSS feed' for over 60,000 websites, is still in early stages, as new technologies and metrics for delivering successful RSS advertising are trialled.
5. Website tagging in which consumers tag websites and stories/links with a self-defined category (eg tag this story 'crap' rss' 'media' 'australia' 'benbarren' 'wanker') These tags can then be viewed by other people and subscribed to through RSS. The net result has been high quality listings based on categories which the users define, without search engine spam, updated in real time. Hello Google :)
6. Venture Capital adds fuel to the fire : Early signs of rapid market consolidation with Bloglines being bought by AskJeeves (who were then bought by Interactive Corp) as well as Newsgator buying Feeddemon, and key leaders in the space such as Newsgator, Feedburner, del.icio.us and Feedster - all raising substantial VC to enable their rapid consolidation (while at the same time Yahoo and Google have been on M+A spending sprees buying 2.0 companies such as flickr, blo.gs, dialpad, dodgeball and many others planned to come) Not to mention podcasting (which also uses the RSS technology) being offered by Apple in their I-Tunes store - which sells 1.2m songs a day : thats another whole post as is the rumoured RSS heavy Google competitor to Itunes - plus a free classifieds service and PayPal banking system : Hello all banks and media companies ;)
7 Enterprise RSS growing, with Newsgator's VP in this space stating that the last year has proven RSS to be "both powerful and versatile, enabling such diverse enterprise functions as corporate communications, sales lead tracking, customer support, brand monitoring, competitive intelligence, project management, HR due diligence, and knowledge management." From speaking to clients every day he sees demand for :
- External public feeds for brand monitoring and competitive awareness
- External premium content from providers like Factiva, Lexis-Nexis, and Thomson Dialog
- Internal and hosted enterprise applications
Within the RSS space, there is also much debate about the role of advertising, free feeds vs subscription, the correct pathway to personalisation, whether an RSS reader should be desktop or web-based, and what the role of blogs and media companies is, in this 'Web 2.0' space.
I can only talk from personal experience, but RSS has made my Internet experience far superior : I now subscribe to specialist writers in the areas I am interested in (Venture Capital, Internet Media, Search, Podcasting, Flat-Bar Bike Riding, LA Sleaze) and read approximately 150 sites 2-3 times a day, with special focus on my favourite 20 sites) I download 5-10 podcasts a day through RSS and listen to them on my Ipod Shuffle when riding my bike, or catching a train.
American RSS companies will be coming to Australia very very soon. Further local RSS technologists, fresh from computer science degrees @ uni, who consider Nirvana a 'historically significant' band have no such neurosis or paranoia about RSS, meta-search technologies and new programming languages such as Ajax, which enable applications like Google's Gmail to closely replicate the benefits of a desktop application without the disadvantages (not being able to log-in thru different devices)
New metaphors for media consumption and software applications, driven by RSS and related technical siblings, will hopefully enable us to lose some of the old business silos we used to define 'newspapers', 'websites', 'search engines' and 'classifieds' - Welcome to the new Remix Culture, as it is called by lawyers, end users and analysts alike. What these services are exactly to be called, I'm not sure, but I know they'll be del.icio.us.
posted by redbarren at 6:48 PM
<< Home