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Google Businesses The Internet

The Importance of RSS 120

Posted by CmdrTaco from the feeds-are-the-new-push dept.
unfoldedorigami writes "Kevin Hale of Particletree wrote an interesting essay about the importance of RSS and speculates that the success of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and Technorati has got Google worried about subscribe becoming the new search. Hale thinks this is the reason behind why they've become so interested in feed reading and the procurement of revenue from them."
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The Importance of RSS More

The Importance of RSS

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  • Web-based RSS Feed Reader (Score:5, Insightful)

    by metlin ( 258108 ) * on Thursday June 16, 2005 @01:41PM (#12834444) Journal

    One solution would be to provide a single point of web-based RSS feed reader of sorts, where people could not only add their bookmarks, but also just log in and read their favorite feeds.

    Imagine this - if Google could provide a good UI and simple but feature rich interface, I could log onto the equivalent of Google FeedReader and add my feeds there.

    A sort of Google-news for RSS feeds, of sorts.

    I mean, they could move people from other webmails to Gmail, this shouldn't be too hard, either. Build a nice system where people can add in their feeds and read them on the web in a non-cluttered, nice, manner and people _will_ use your system.

    That would give them more power to search and catalogue user preferences - although from a Big Brother perspective, that isn't necessarily a good thing.

    I sense a good opening for a web-application!
    • I think what you're trying to say is that "RSS lets me type up my post on a subject before even loading up the page, and then I get first post."
    • Combine that with some of the latest trends (like search-query based RSS - implemented at vobbo [vobbo.com] - example - search for 'tristen' [vobbo.com]), and you could have some really great feeds.

      I can just imagine, a feed of boobies from around the world.
    • Something like Bloglines? [bloglines.com] (now owned by AskJeeves)
    • Whatever happened to a little web blip I saw a few months ago about an integrated RSS reader in the Gmail web interface?

    • Re:Web-based RSS Feed Reader (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Thursday June 16, 2005 @02:03PM (#12834616) Journal
      Imagine this - if Google could provide a good UI and simple but feature rich interface, I could log onto the equivalent of Google FeedReader and add my feeds there.

      I think Google Fusion [google.com] is going to do this "soon".

      From the FAQ [google.com], bolding in reply mine:
      11. Can I add other news sources or feeds?

      Not yet, but stay tuned. We chose the currently available feeds for this beta release of personalized homepages in order to give a good sampling of content from across the web. Right now you can choose from among leading U.S. news feeds, international news feeds, technology feeds, and non-tech/non-news feeds. As we continue to improve this feature, we envision enabling users to add almost any standardized feed to your personalized homepage.

      With "standardized feed" I assume they mean feeds following the RSS and/or Atom standards.

      Anyway, in this case, you'd have your RSS feeds on your main Google search page if using this feature.
    • My Yahoo! [yahoo.com] is my all-OS, all-browser RSS reader. There are other services like Bloglines that already exist.

      Yahoo! Search already provides an option to "add this to My Yahoo" for search results. Take a look at a sample search [yahoo.com].

      I eagerly await Google's revolutionary imitation of all Yahoo's progress in RSS reading.
    • Google has been doing this [google.com] for a long time. You just need a google account.

    • Re:Web-based RSS Feed Reader (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ShieldW0lf ( 601553 ) on Thursday June 16, 2005 @02:20PM (#12834768) Journal
      This is really funny, in a shake your head in disgust kind of way.

      The reason that people turn to something like RSS is because it lets them get to the meat faster without the extraneous crap. Searching through google results exposes you to it, searching through your various favorite sites in your bookmarks exposes you to it, etc. RSS does not, and therefore people gravitate towards it.

      Advertising IS extraneous crap. If you put it in RSS feeds, people will no longer have the motivation to use it. You'll be breaking the tool.

      It's such a joke. A new information-location technology comes out that is more effective at filtering out crap, the public jumps onboard because they don't want to see the crap, the IT guys jump onboard because that's where the people are and try to make a profit by forcing the public to waste their time looking at someones crap, and the people leave for greener pastures.

      Thing is, people came to recognize that it's not the technology that was important, but the providers of the technology... they're the ones you trust (or don't trust) not to betray you, break the tool, and waste your time.

      Google didn't rise to prominance because they have wonderful technology... lots of companies have wonderful technology. They rose to prominance because people came to trust them to filter the crap and give them what they're looking for better than their contemporaries.

      Now, google is a big publicly traded company. They shove some crap in your face when you do a search, carefully weighing just how much crap they can get away with. They corrupt and poison the very infrastructure of the web itself with their "replace key words in content with div-pops and links to advertising in a way that obfuscates the fact that is advertising until you have already been exposed to it" technology. I can't speak for others, but while flash ads and banners merely annoy me, this particular technique actually makes me angry as hell.

      While there is a large amount of inertia to overcome, this sort of shit will eventually spell the end of their relevance, because people will eventually come to realize that it doesn't really matter what the technology of the moment is, they will come to know that google is going to pervert it and waste their time in the name of profit.

      This happened to sites like yahoo and msn and that provided the opportunity for google to rise to prominance. Now it's happening to google and providing an opportunity for another to rise to prominance.

      Not a moment too soon if you ask me. If I never see another IntelliText link slip through my adblocker, it will be too soon.
      • The web used to have no ads. For a while, google had no ads, or at least they were only down the right hand side. RSS used to have no ads. It seems there's no way out, the next replacement will grow ads, though one can try and keep ahead of the wave I suppose.

      • Re:Web-based RSS Feed Reader (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Baricom ( 763970 ) on Thursday June 16, 2005 @04:19PM (#12835966)
        Advertising IS extraneous crap.
        Yes, but it also pays the bills. If the web content companies don't advertise, what business model should they use?

        They corrupt and poison the very infrastructure of the web itself with their "replace key words in content with div-pops and links to advertising in a way that obfuscates the fact that is advertising until you have already been exposed to it" technology.
        Are you claiming this is Google's idea? I've seen this, but never in association with Google. You later put a name to it - "IntelliText [sic]" - but IntelliTXT is run by Vibrant Media, which doesn't appear to have any ties with Google. Please provide a counterexample.
        • I stand corrected. IntelliTXT is run by Vibrant Media. Google uses Adwords, which creates a contextually determined HTML based advertisement that runs down the side of the page and Autolink, which replaces keywords in the site with links in the same sort of fashion as IntelliTXT.
          • It absolutly, 100% does not replace keywords with links. Do us all a favor and visit the spybot homepage [spybot.info]. Or perhaps you mean Autolink from the google toolbar? Which you have have installed, and to click?
            • It absolutly, 100% does not replace keywords with links. Do us all a favor and visit the spybot homepage. Or perhaps you mean Autolink from the google toolbar? Which you have have installed, and to click?

              Perhaps I did mean autolink. I mean, I did specifically say so in my post, after all.
        • Yes, but it also pays the bills. If the web content companies don't advertise, what business model should they use?

          How about gofuckthemselves.com?

        • Yes, but it also pays the bills. If the web content companies don't advertise, what business model should they use? Payed accounts done it so well for livejournal.com
      • Google doesn't do keyword replacement/popups in pages (neither its own pages, other site pages, nor Adsense clients). I don't know where you got that idea from.

        I will agree that it's quite annoying but Google isn't doing it. I think the only way Google can be said to do this is with the 'autolink' button on the Google toolbar, which is only tangentially similar to what you're talking about.

    • Well, I doubt that Google is "worried" about RSS feeds, they're just looking at them as another source of information to search. The GoogleBot kicks the tires of my blog [makeeasymo...google.com] at least once a day, so I can only imagine that it's doing the same for everyone else's. It's just a logical extension of what they already do. Replace "is worried" with "sees an opportunity", in other words.

      Eric

    • I didnt really find one that i liked, so i wrote my own. Posted it on my website, now i dont have to remember what RSS feeds i have in my reader at home. Now the problem is making sure they are synced up, but ive reached the maximum amount i can really handle in one sitting. I used php and the magpie library (and mysql). Ended up working out well for me. Not really customisable if i was to setup a service, but hey, it works, right?
    • When I had the need to collect lots of news sources together (mostly due to being sick of oodles of ads), I sat down one afternoon and wrote my own [wirelesscouch.net]. Over the last couple of years I've slowly evolved it into the masterpiece (ha!) that it is today.
    • Guess this is a good time to promote my rss-homepage scripts. I actually programmed this before the Google interface, but I have to admit, it's nowhere near as nice to use, but I slightly different concept.

      It's a bit tricky to configure, and hasn't been updated in months, but can still be useful.
      http://rss2php.sourceforge.net/rss-homepage.php [sourceforge.net]
      (don't worry this isn't marketing really - it's opensource :) )

      I think web interfaces are the future to reading RSS feeds, and can be much more powerful than simple
    • I sense a good opening for a web-application!

      *begin shameless plug*
      Done! myList [coreynitschke.com] is a free web app which stores links, text, code snippets, and yes, RSS feeds as viewable objects. Keep all of your bookmarks, feeds, text resumes, etc in one place and access them anywhere!
      *end plug*

    • and i'd just like an image rss feed reader, that is see a small description of an image and see a thumbnail next to it from my favorites bar updated as the person puts more on it ^^ yep, google best catch on, rss is more than just text afterall

    • Imagine this - if Google could provide a good UI and simple but feature rich interface, I could log onto the equivalent of Google FeedReader and add my feeds there. A sort of Google-news for RSS feeds, of sorts.

      You mean like this [yahoo.com]?

      My Yahoo! has been doing this for 2+ years now. Google is playing catch-up.

    • I think you would be interested in Start1 [start.com] or Start2 [start.com]

      Its put out by Microsoft, but you don't sign up for an account. Its beta, so odds are that will change.

      It supports uploading OPML files so you can export your existing feeds and upload them to the website.

      Heres a good writeup [masternewmedia.org] about it.
    • You mean something along the lines of this [aseville.com]? I've been tweaking this for good while and I need more people to try it out for load testing. If many people subscribe to one feed, only one copy of that feed is done for everyone. It follows RSS guidelines for refreshing information (time limiting).
    • again, talking technology just cramps your thinking room.

      GOOGLE ALREADY DO THIS, without your customisation page, and adding a 'choose your own RSS' if managed correctly people will love it.

      Have RSS subscriptions in your GMAIL account (with diffing, so only new articles come up as unread etc - don't know if rss supports this? (article id'ing, else just use url))

      RSS for slashdot == correct. Using is as a news source on google news? not correct.
    • Rojo [rojo.com] is yet another app that already does this.

  • Not here... (Score:2, Funny)

    by matt me ( 850665 )
    I won't be able to get this article on my /. feed for another hour...

    • Re:Not here... (Score:3, Funny)

      by m50d ( 797211 )
      I got it just a minute ago. The half hour in the faq is just to scare you, they don't really block you even if you check it every 30 sepjoi4321#]p9i'#!"^%!^£ +++ NO CARRIER

  • Amusing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Thursday June 16, 2005 @01:44PM (#12834469) Homepage Journal
    I like how Slashdot posts a story about the importance of RSS, but their own RSS service will ban you for 3 days if you just look at it funny.

  • How about ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Numair ( 77943 ) on Thursday June 16, 2005 @01:44PM (#12834473) Homepage
    Search being the new search? Seriously; these online search engines haven't improved much in the past 5 years (yes, it's been 5 years since Google started growing by leaps and bounds, became the Yahoo default, and amazed us all ...).
    • The reason search engines haven't improved much in the past five years may be that they will, by nature, always lack a human component. Yes Google's page rank is influenced by the links of other sights but because it is an algorithm it is vulnerable to exploitation. RSS feeds have a distinct human "breaking news" feel to them. An opportunity to search many different versions of the "breaking news" each moderated by real human beings could defiantly be a next step for the internet.

  • Yeesh (Score:5, Funny)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Thursday June 16, 2005 @01:47PM (#12834489) Journal
    ...Google worried about subscribe becoming the new search.

    "Y is the new X" is the new "Hello! 1993 called and they want their X back!"

  • I doubt it will replace search engines... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pthor1231 ( 885423 ) on Thursday June 16, 2005 @01:50PM (#12834510)
    I mean, come on. RSS feeds are useful for stuff that you check daily, hourly, etc. This is usually stuff you are familiar with, and would know how to find in the first place. On the other hand, if I want to find something out about a subject I'm not particularly familiar with, I go to google and search.
    • While I seriously doubt that the advent of RSS will affect Google much at all, Google would probably rather you search for something, then forget about where to find it and have to search for it again next time, rather than finding it once and subscribing.

      Besides, even if RSS becomes The Next Intarweb(TM), we'll still need to have someone index the billions of RSS feeds.

    • On the other hand, wouldn't you like to know if google found any NEW information about certain topics.
      • Get an alert when google bot runs across a new page that mentions your name.
      • Be notified when the when the search engine results page changes for a query that brings your site a lot of traffic.
      • Have news results that match your query pop up on your RSS reader.

      Some of these things are already available. For example pubsub.com [pubsub.com] will tell you about new pages for your ego surf. CNN has email alerts that i

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The Slashdot summary is misleading about the content of the article. It's about new material on the Web, of which the most important category is blog entries. Del.icio.us is good at telling you about cool new sites. Google doesn't sort by date.

      By "the new search" they might mean "the new cool thing now that search is largely done", but it's certainly nowhere near "search is over and replaced with RSS". RSS tells you about cool new stuff; search is how you find answers to questions. They apply to differe
    • You do that now but what if you could enter your search term in an RSS Aggregator and have that do your work for you? Search results returned now are static - an ongoing search engine that fed results to you via RSS is much more useful.
      The web is too dynamic to not benefit from ongoing search technology. The only real difference is using RSS to regularly disperse information that is new or changed since the last distribution.
    • I think they're more worried about it from a revenue perspective. If more people use gather all their info via RSS feeds then that means the less people doing acctuall searches. Then, Google doen't get as many ad click-throughs.

  • the important of RSS is.. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 16, 2005 @01:51PM (#12834518)
    ..that it's just pure content without any layout or crap. In other words, it makes reading web sites as easy as it was in 1995.

    Of course, at some point they will start putting crap in RSS feeds (they are already putting ads in the feeds.. I agree with Dave Winer: isn't the feed an ad ALREADY??), and someone will re-invent it all over again.

    But for now it's a great way to just read content without crap. Say, that's a good slogan: "RSS: content without crap".

  • Seriously... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipak AT yahoo DOT com> on Thursday June 16, 2005 @01:58PM (#12834582) Homepage Journal
    RSS is pretty crappy, as it is a point-to-point protocol. What would be good would be if websites sent out multicasts when an update occured, as then all interested parties could monitor for that and we wouldn't get system overloads.


    (Slashdot, if I understand correctly, limits RSS because massive monitoring kills the network and servers. But if they only transmitted a single multicast on an event - such as a FP update - or every 30 minutes, the load would be negligable and yet everyone would get instantaneous updates.)


    In the end, RSS is a dead-end technology, because the network will always expand faster than any given pipe, which means point-to-point will inevitably fail in the end. It doesn't scale.


    RSS is good, yeah, but only as a stop-gap until ISPs can be pressured into enabling technologies they should never have disabled.

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday June 16, 2005 @02:05PM (#12834638)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • What you say applies to the web as a whole. I find it ridiculous that there is no way to have the server send content to the client without the client first having to ask for it.

      Instead of using AJAX or an autorefresh every 10 seconds while awaiting for content, why can't we have something that will just listen until the server decides to send something?

      Same thing with RSS. We refresh every x seconds, while we could just be listening indefinitely until we receive something.

      Perhaps establish some sort of
    • Yes we should storm the citidal's and demand the major backbones not block multi-cast traffic.

      I mean surely there is no way this could EVER be mis-used.

      Well, you know, except for increasing the effectiveness of a zombie bot army from being able to hit 100's of machines at once to millions at once.

      But hey! That a small price to pay for instant updates when my favorite porn site finds a new pic to post!

    • RSS is pretty crappy, as it is a point-to-point protocol. What would be good would be if websites sent out multicasts when an update occured, as then all interested parties could monitor for that and we wouldn't get system overloads.

      Right on.

      We're working on exactly that here at Rice [rice.edu]. FeedTree (paper [rice.edu]) is a newsfeed distribution system, built atop the self-organizing Pastry [rice.edu] overlay and the Scribe [rice.edu] multicast algorithm. Scribe is self-organizing and low-maintenance; everyone shares the load of distrib

      • We're working on exactly that here at Rice. ... FeedTree ... is a newsfeed distribution system, built atop the self-organizing Pastry overlay...

        Mmm. Sounds tasty. (Then again, so does the very notion of a news feed...)

        • If you'd said "Mmmmm... Beefy!" I would have hidden under the table. It's bad enough that computing is all about chips, bytes and nibbles, that Linux' mascot is an English chocolate bar and that C shells remind me of C food....
          • I've lived in Britain since day zero of my life - in Sussex, the Midlands - and worked in London for a year. I've never seen "Tux" chocolate. I can't think of any chocolates or sweets with any computer or nerd related titles.

            That said, if you go to Rochester in Kent, there is a newsagent there called "RSS News".
      • That's absolutely wonderful! (Though you have probably now slashdotted your server... :)


        Please, please make an announcement on Freshmeat when this comes out. I'll be monitoring the site, but official announcements make it easier to see when an update is crucial.

    • RSS supports a system called "clouds." Just like in Soviet Russia, the feed polls you, not the other way around.

      It's a shame nobody uses it. It's not multicast, but it would still scale better than constant polling by the masses does. I think part of the problem is that the spec isn't clear in certain parts.
    • In fairness, you make good points - but I fail to see how Slashdot serving up a RSS feed of its headlines is anywhere near as bad as someone checking the homepage frequently, bandwidth/etc. wise.

      A better solution is to only request the RSS feed when the user initiates it, or has the feed visible (in their browser / other). A feed that's not visible doesn't need to be updated.

      As an example for Firefox - instead of updating every hour or however (and throughout the night for those who leave their browse
      • Good points. That would be another way to reduce bandwidth costs. A manual update might be irritating to users, but then there's also nothing quite so irritating as something updating while you are trying to click on a link. A manual update would mean that you wouldn't get into fights with the software over who is in charge.

        The problem there, though, is it requires that the software be written with the remote server in mind. That doesn't usually happen, especially where the programmers are neither the use

  • Similar to RSS, people can put whatever content in meta tags to explain what their content is about. The problem is that with everyone doing this there's a ton of data and a lot of it is junk. That's where the search engines come in.

    RSS isn't going to replace search... the search engines will just have an easier job if the RSS feeds are provided for them.
  • [...] the success of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and Technorati [...]

    It seems like sites like this end up with a few thousand hardcore users and the rest of the people using the internet don't care about them in the least. That is what Google has to be afraid of?

    I think that people making such speculation are just too short of understanding to see that the internet is more than just Google. Using the internet for something other than searching the web doesn't hurt Google in the least.
  • I think a key difference between subscription and search is that you may have use for searching for one thing, one time. As a matter of fact I'd think that this is by far the most common use of search. Maybe you hit google news everyday to check for "Free porn movie downloads" or something, and that you can subscribe to. But how about when I just have a one-time question, like what's a "xenops [google.com]"? Google's perfect for that and I can't see RSS being a big problem.

    Generic RSS subscription (where you just click the "syndicate this site" link or little orange button) is not very useful as a replacement for search because you don't get to customize anything. Unless the blog in question offers categories, then you're stuck getting whatever they push onto the feed, even though the strength of RSS is supposed to be that you're pulling the information over.

    Instead, you want to go with an RSS subscription that gives you some measure of control, specified by you. But what? A search term? I watch news.google.com for "Shakespeare". And I get every hit -- shakespeare fishing rods, shakespeare references in businessweek, and some football player named shakespeare who fell off a boat and died. Not what I want. At least something like a delicious theoretically goes one step above, because by having an army of monkeys tagging URLs by the thousands, you're assuming that you've attached validated meta data to each link. When I search delicious for things that are tagged Shakespeare, I might not only get exactly what I want, but my odds are much higher that it will be what I expected.

  • RSS and Bandwith (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jockm ( 233372 ) on Thursday June 16, 2005 @02:19PM (#12834752) Homepage
    I've set up blogs for a couple of people (including myself), and RSS feeds for providing other forms of information. One thing I've noticed was that once the RSS feed was created, there would be an increase in bandwith consumed, that was disporportionate to the increase in subscribers. Far too many people have their aggregators set to fetch far too often. The increase in web based aggregators has helped since then the feed is cached and reused by many people.

  • The REAL importance of RSS (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Beek ( 10414 )
    It interrupts me from my work every hour :-)
  • Feeds are really nothing more than supercharged bookmarks that are constantly updated. Google gets by perfectly well with bookmarks still around, so why would they suddenly feel threatened by feeds? Don't tell me you use search to get to sites you read every day whose URLs you know by heart. In response to the feed ads Google's testing, the reason they're experimenting is that such ads are a potential source of income, and as a company Google only survives as long as it has income.
    • I think Google should worry about feeds because human input weighs much higher than that of a bot. Bookmarks provide vetting and categorisation that Google has taken some 7 years to build, albeit not perfectly. If you do a search on Google, you only get the most popular pages first, but are they the most relevant? Vertical searches WILL eventually take over from a general search. Check out projects like Gataga.com [gataga.com], they're already providing vertical search capabilities by indexing bookmarking sites. As the

  • Spurl (Score:2, Interesting)

    by camcorder ( 759720 )
    I'm really suprised when people still mention delicious, but not spurl.net. As an social bookmarking system spurl is much more superior than delicious. It has also a nifty zniff.com, which you can search among spurled (bookmarked) pages. That guarantees no ads, and commercials most of times.
    More users everyday putting their spurl rss feeds to their blogs, even some have created tools that post new spurls when they have added as blog.

  • Pity (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Thursday June 16, 2005 @03:00PM (#12835139) Journal
    I feel sorry for Google. They have to run in all directions at once, even if those directions are terribly absurd.
  • Google's dejanews database is a goldmine of information if you extract it properly. One problem with trend-tracking is getting back-dated data to help confirm that a trend is really in place.

    http://www.realmeme.com/miner/new.php?startup=/min er/technology/hibernatevsrubyDejanews.png [realmeme.com]

    I can get backfill data from dejanews, but a more profitable solution is to catch the trend early. heoretically, you could do that from a good sample of RSS feeds by doing frequency counts on words and phrases.

    I spent some
  • As of this writing, any filter relying on the SBL is now marking email with the url "paulgraham.com" as spam. Why? Because the guys at the SBL want to pressure Yahoo, where paulgraham.com is hosted, to delete the site of a company they believe is spamming.

    The SBL is used to blacklist SMTP gateways, not URL's appearing in the body of an e-mail message. The SpamAssassin process used SRBL [srbl.org] to scan messages for "spammy" URLs. It has nothing to do with SBL blacklisting of gateways.

    When criticizing a tool as

  • if it where not for the SlashDot RSS feed, i'd probably never read the news. thank you slashdot on my desktop!
  • Ever notice that each site with NEWs has the same news? One would think that the internet would kill the monolithic ap feeds and provide more diverse coverage of world events. It seems that most news sites get their content from RSS feeds and THEN provide RSS feeds that other newsites pull from to get their content and THEN provide RSS feeds that other newsites pull from to get their content and THEN provide RSS feeds that other newsites pull from to get their content and THEN provide RSS feeds that other

  • OpenSearch (Score:5, Interesting)

    by image ( 13487 ) on Thursday June 16, 2005 @04:34PM (#12836131) Homepage
    Actually, the convergence of search and syndication is what led A9 [a9.com] to create OpenSearch [a9.com]. OpenSearch is a standard for search results that, not coincidentally, is built as an extension to RSS. In just a couple of months a few hundred sites have adopted it -- seems like there is a market there. (Disclosure, not that there is a conflict of interest there, but I am the lead for the project.)

    And it's not just for A9 -- anyone can use OpenSearch to syndicate their search to anyone else. One example of a search aggregator other than A9 using OpenSearch is OSFeed [osfeed.com]. And example of a search engine that can be accessed by anyone is AWS OpenSearch [unto.net], which lets you search Amazon via RSS.

    So in other words, when done well search and RSS are highly compatible.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday June 16, 2005 @04:39PM (#12836195)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • The only people who need to worry are those that create "dotcode" and similar systems - with RSS feeds, you can see the new articles without the ads :)

    Searching is looking for something specific. Feeds are for "what's new." These are quite different activities.
  • Whereas the article title hints to RSS being the new search, it isn't really the case unless you're talking about sites like PubSub [pubsub.com] which really do convert search queries into RSS (or pushed feeds.)
  • Hey y'all, --- I didn't notice any other mention of this in here, but I also submit that I didn't read every comment... --- The easiest way to utilize the RSS capabilities of websites is to use the new browser Safari RSS from Apple. It shows right in the address bar whether or not the site supports RSS feeds, and with one click a user can switch to viewing the site in RSS format. --- Also, thanks to Apple's new search technology called Spotlight, a user can instantaneously search every article on the site a

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