Month: August 2003

Dan Gillmor writes about the rise of RSS web syndication. What’s happening is related to the boom vision of “internet push” technology, yet very different.
Microsoft, Netscape, and the late unlamented PointCast envisioned a world where Net feeds from corporate content providers would be streamed to the desktops of users, surrounded by ads. Media companies would pay huge premiums to snag plum real estate on the “webtop.” The cable television business model would take over.
RSS newsreaders put the choice of content in the hands of the end-user. RSS feeds come from big companies and local friends. Search engines find related content, aggregating the bottom-up choices of readers and writers.
Gillmor writes about current and emerging uses for RSS, beyond subscribing to weblogs and newspapers. Chris Pirillo sees RSS evolving as a replacement for e-mail publishing and marketing. Dave Sifry envisions RSS applications that “aggregate information from traffic cameras, published to the Web, to be able to more effectively calculate and predict traffic flow during rush hour? How about entirely new industrial applications made possible because the sensors are all describing information in the same format?” Dan Gillmor anticipates more control over the selection and display of content “more nuance, such as the ability to highlight by topic, by writer, by popularity and other measures.
It will be interesting to see where RSS goes from here, but on thing’s for sure. It doesn’t look much like cable television.

The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) covers contact mining tools, from companies including Visible Path, Spoke Software, and Zero Degrees.

The goal is to identify people within the company who have potentially useful contacts elsewhere and could make a personal introduction, say, linking a salesperson with a potential customer, an attorney with a prospective client or a fund-raiser with likely donors.

Success depends on effective use of permission and integration into the existing social network. For example, when a salesperson using Visible Path asks the system for an introduction to a person at Microsoft, she doesn’t find the name of the contact inside the company, or the contact at Microsoft, until after the person who has the contact has given consent.
These tools complement explicit networking tools, like Linked In, Friendster and Ryze, where participants explicitly declare their business and personal relationships.
These approaches represent two ends of a continuum
* contact mining tools infer relationships from email and address book contacts
* social network tools explicitly represent relationships
A third complementary approach is emerging, based on hyperlinked public and semipublic media such as wikis and weblogs. Tools like Technorati and Feedster implicitly identify relationships by following the trail of hyperlinks.
On the one hand, a link relationship is weaker — hyperlinks are one-way, and may indicate a tangential association rather than a direct relationship. On the other hand, the content is public. So you can read the discussion over time, and decide for yourself whether Sam Ruby knows Mark Pilgrim.

Bill Gross writes:

Here’s what’s really true and important about RSS: It increases the rate at which information flows by and it decreases the number of times you read a web page twice.
RSS makes the web more addictive; it helps make sure we only get new-to-us information, and that we get that information when it’s fresh….
I’m just not sure that the side effect, of accelerating the rate at which we turn into into information junkies, is necessarily a good thing.

I’m trying to get the network-surfing thing, I really am. I still think weblogs are a much richer way to get to know people than profile forms.
Instead of shoehorning people’s taste into a few favorites, a blog lets you check out what people are reading and watching and listening to.
Blog posts are conversational. They invite response, and it’s easy enough to join the conversation in comments.
Writing a blog post is easy. You have something to say; and people in mind to say it to, and write.
Writing a profile entry is really, really hard. Abstracting the essence of one’s identity into a paragraph or two is a miserable, impossible task.
And it feels barely relevant; one’s identity is made up of a series of interactions, moments, perceptions, actions. A blog captures the flow of identity. A profile forces you to pin it like a butterfly to a page.