As I May Think...

Magazine or Music? Issues of Syndication Law

Denise Howell has been analyzing the implications of copyright law for RSS/Atom syndication on her new Lawgarithms blog at ZDnet. Clearly stating that many of the issues are currently unsettled, Denise encourages "participatory law" and asks readers to provide "reasons why RSS publishing isn't like free magazine publishing"... There are quite a few reasons, I think. As one digs into this subject of the law of syndication, it will become apparent that there are many, many interesting issues to be dealt with. For instance, one very significant difference is:

The publisher of a magazine has total control over the presentation of content in that magazine. However, the publisher of an RSS/Atom syndication feed has very little, if any, "control" over the presentation of data published in a feed.

The implication of this difference is that we might be making a mistake when we compare web and RSS/Atom syndicated content to normal text-based paper publications. It might be more useful to consider such content as though it were computer programs or even music!

Doc Searls comments on Google Blog Search

Doc Searls, a member of the Technorati Advisory Board and Editor of Linux Journal has written an interesting piece on Google Blog Search. In it, he says:

A few minutes ago I spoke to Jason Goldman, who runs both Blogger and Blog Search at Google. Rather than predicting the death of competitors in the Live Web space, he said he expected it to become energized and to grow.

I think Jason's right. As I noted in an earlier post, too much of the time, money and effort of otherwise innovative blogosphere infrastructure providers has gone into vain attempts to build "little Googles" focused on the Blogosphere. It should have been obvious to everyone that eventually the "big boys" (Yahoo!, Google, MSN, etc.) would reclaim their turf and provide the same leadership in retrospective blog search that they do in traditional web search. My hope is that innovators and startups will refocus themselves on doing really new and different things -- try to push beyond the obvious and figure out what is really useful!

One of the interesting aspects of Google's entry into the world of Blog Search is that they have announced (informally) that they will soon be hosting a FeedMesh node! That means that they, like Yahoo!, PubSub, and others, will soon be sharing information about all the blog updates they discover. The result of this is that we'll all be able to focus our competitive efforts on what we do with syndicated data -- not just on how much of it we have. We'll all have the same data -- but some of us will do more interesting and useful things with it! The innovation that results should be of great benefit for end users while also opening up new areas for business and service development.

I think Google's entry into the blog search space will be remembered as a real "watershed" moment for the blogosphere. Now, we're moving into a new phase -- a much more interesting phase.

bob wyman

Joe Reger shows us the future of blogging...

Joe Reger has posted a note linking to an astounding demo that clearly shows one of the most exciting elements in blogging's future. Today, blogs are limited primarily to unstructured text. In the future, I think we'll see blogs used to publish structured data as well. Instead of going to a walled garden site to publish notices of things you'd like to sell, reviews of books you've read, or your resume, what you'll be able to do is just publish those "offers-to-sell", reviews, etc. on your own blog or website and then have the search and matching services pull in your data the same way that services pull in HTML pages and RSS/Atom feeds today. We'll see that blogs, incorporating structured publishing ideas like those that Joe demonstrates, will become the most important tools in chipping away at the Grey Web and revealing in a more useful way the vast stores of data that are currently hidden in the web today.

Joe has been developing his "DataBlogging" idea for years and recently we've been working together with a group of other folk to combine the best of his ideas with the best of the ideas from StructuredBlogging, semantic web formats, and microformats. All of these ideas and proposals have the same basic "Web 2.0" theme: Make it easier for computers to process the data on the web by publishing that data in formats which are easily parsed and manipulated.

I'm looking forward to seeing Joe's demo evolve into production code and am excited by the prospects of continuing to work with him on these ideas. I sincerely hope that other blog software developers will see the wisdom in what's being done here and the exciting opportunities that structured publishing will create for us all.

bob wyman

Google SiteMaps = LRSS (Less Rich Site Summary)

Ben Hammersley, Danny Ayers, Robert Scoble and others will soon have to update their RSS/Atom books... The long series of experiments with "rich site summaries" and metacontent which began with Guha's work at Apple in 1996 has moved on to yet-another-file-format for describing the structure of and updates to web sites. Yesterday, Google released "Sitemaps" in an apparent attempt to revive the original idea that "sites," not just blogs, should announce changes to their pages using a common crawlable format. But this new format is neither RSS (in any of its many flavors) nor Atom. Perhaps we should refer to it as LRSS (Less-Rich-Site-Summary)... :-)

We've learned from experimentation in the blogosphere of the great benefit that can come from publishers announcing the changes to their websites and of searching or matching engines that are designed to process these announcements. Today, while it can sometimes takes literally weeks for an update to a "normal" web site to be discovered and indexed by search engines, updates in the blogosphere are typically processed by discovery and notification services within seconds or minutes. The resulting increase in "information liquidity" that results has shaped an environment which is much more dynamic and vibrant than that of normal web sites. Now, Sitemaps holds the promise of drastically cutting down the delay between when new data is published on the web and when consumers of the data are able to discover it. Rather than having to inspect each page on a site everytime they pass by, search engine crawlers will be able to focus their attention on just the Sitemap files -- if they exist. Additionally, Sitemap sites will be able to focus the attention of crawlers on just those pages that make sense to index -- not those pages that have little value to the search engines. The result should be beneficial all around. Consumers will have more timely information and publishers will feel the benefit of publishing data much more rapidly than before. Search engines will run much more efficiently and effectively.

Technorati.com joins PubSub and BlogPulse in the "10+ million Club"

As I predicted in my recent posting, it appears that Technorati has crossed the line and is now claiming to monitor over 10 million blogs. Before today, only Blogpulse and PubSub could claim that they were monitoring more than 10 million. So, to all the folk at Technorati, I'd like to say: Welcome to the Club! Let's hope other folk join us soon!

In the future, as a result of the growing acceptance of the FeedMesh, we'll find that it won't be nearly as hard for new and existing blog monitoring or search services to know about just as much data as the rest of us do. FeedMesh establishes a system that will allow us all to "share and share-alike" information about the new blogs we discover and updates to existing blogs. The result will be that services will compete with each other by focusing on providing high quality services to our users -- not just by trying to have the largest number of feeds. i.e. We should be competing based on quality, not quantity...

bob wyman

AOL opens blogging to non-subscribers

The Blogosphere grows! We now have a new entrant in the "Free Blogging" space. MediaWeek and John Panzer of AOL report that AOL has opened their journals.aol.com blogging service to anyone who has an AIM account (just about everyone it seems...). To find out more, go to the AimBlogs page at: http://pc.channel.aol.com/aimblogs .

There are a number of really neat features in AOL's service that havent' gotten much notice in the past -- probably because it has been a closed service. One neat feature of the new service is that they have implemented a text search capability that lets you search across all the Aim Blogs. Another feature that I like is that I can update my AOL Journal from within the AIM client itself by sending messages to the AOLJournals bot. Also, you can use AOLByPhone to update your blog over the phone and you can set up AOLAlerts to send you a message whenever somone comments on your blog or when someone updates a blog you're reading (It's kind of like a private, limited version of PubSub integrated with AIM...)

RSS Ads done the wrong way!

We've recently received complaints about a large number of duplicate entries suddenly being published by PubSub. This has been a bit of a surprise because we normally get good marks on the effectiveness of our duplicate detection algorithms... On close inspection, it appears that the recent problems are being caused by DoubleClick ads which are being inserted in such a way that the duplicate detection code in our feed readers is tricked into thinking that the entries with DoubleClick ads are "updated" every time we read them.

The FeedBurner feed for the Industry Standard provides a good example of the problem. If you do "view source" on that feed, you'll see that each of the entries carries a link to the ad.doubleclick.com site and each link URL looks something like:

http:// ad. doubleclick.net/jump/idg.us.idg.net.standard.rsstower/;
pos=skyscraper;tile=2;sz=160x600;ord=20050428170456

The problem is that the "ord" part of the url changes very frequently throughout the day... While I'm sure that someone at DoubleClick thinks that it is useful to have whatever intelligence is provided by the tracking data in the "ord" field, this is clearly a case of ad insertion done wrong... Let's hope this doesn't become accepted as "Industry Standard" practice!

Beginning RSS and Atom Programming

My copy of Beginning RSS and Atom Programming by Danny Ayers and Andrew Watt arrived in the mail today and I must say that I'm terribly impressed. There have been a number of books written about RSS, however, this 700+ page tome is unquestionably the biggest and most complete. It is also the most up-to-date. It provides in-depth coverage of everything from MCF and CDF (ancestors of today's RSS and Atom) to the FeedMesh.

Weblogs.com now supports Extended Ping!

I was very pleased today to see Dave Winer's post saying that Weblogs.com has been updated to support the Extended Ping format which enhances the old Basic Ping format by providing a pointer to an rssUrl. While most sites that ping weblogs.com are still only sending basic pings, my hope is that the transition to Extended Ping will be rapid. Ideally, all of the entries in weblogs.com's changes files will soon have rssUrl attributes!

Basic Ping is becoming historical. Extended Ping grows in use.

Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, wrote on the FeedMesh mailing list:

WordPress, a significant source of pings to Ping-O-Matic, will now be sending out extended pings. [link]

This is excellent news! While once it might have seemed sensible to ignore RSS and Atom files when announcing blog updates (as the old "basic ping" ignores them), that simply isn't reasonable anymore. Blogging has moved beyond the idea of "personal webpages" and begun to pioneer new forms of content syndication that rely on machine processable Web 2.0 data structures like RSS and Atom files.

My sincere hope is that WordPress will soon completely drop or deprecate support for basic pings and that all other blogging software will do the same. Only extended pings, which include pointers to a site's RSS or Atom file, make sense today. Some techies might argue that tools should continue to support both forms of ping as a way of ensuring that users have "choice" -- but that is just silly. Forcing the non-technical users, who are the majority of bloggers, to make the choice between the old basic ping and the newer, more powerful extended ping is simply adding useless complexity to the problem of managing a blog. We need to make blogging simpler, not more complex.