futureblog

Re: Rest in Peace, RSS

Steve Gillmor, could you be more melodramatic?

“It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of news, which means it’s not worth swimming in if you get my drift.”

Now keep in mind that I haven’t looked at my feeds in over two weeks so I understand what he is getting at, I just think he’s going at it the wrong way.

I think the message should be that RSS needs a makeover. More accurately, news sources need to take a look at how they use RSS.

1. Comments - The RSS spec allows for a comments element that can contain a link to the feed of the conversation. This could be pulled in by a feed reader. Then, using openID or any other open login on the source’s end, comments could be posted to the source from the reader.
2. Style - The spec and readers need to account for style that can be added into an article. It may be as easy as including a css file with each feed and item or it may even include a layer of xslt to style the elements for each device. Whatever tech is used to make it happen, print media news sources want to be able to carry over their layout skills in a format that can be delivered.
3. Some old media news sources need to own up to the fact that their RSS feeds suck. They need to put a dedicated person on managing their feeds within every section of their site to ensure a proper and accurate push of timely information. That info then needs to be regurgitated in twitter and on facebook. This means leveraging your feeds against the APIs of these networks. twitterfeed doesn’t cut it. Updating once every thirty minutes is not “breaking news”. Update early and often. This means that the publishing system you use must generate up to the minute feeds, which can be hard if you are generating a static version of your site to keep server load down.

For all I know the tech changes could be in the works. It’s more likely that these things will come from extensions of Atom rather than a new version of RSS.

I know for sure that there is lots of talk in our newsroom about how to use twitter and how we can better organize our feeds for timely output to the many devices that they have to cover. It’s obvious that these conversations should have been had long ago but big ships turn slowly.

This post by Gillmor is obviously just link bait. He’s getting what he wanted, lots of comments and people like me linking back to this geeky soap opera of a post. However, new devices are always on the horizon. People will start thinking of a new xml syndication format that allows a great layout person at a newspaper to keep delivering the great imagery and important info graphics right along side story that they have been delivering for the past several decades.

In my opinion art is one of the things that keeps newspapers alive and viable. Most bloggers don’t have art/layout departments and neither do TV stations. Someone has to provide graphics for the bloggers to link to. Info graphics is a whole other can of worms, though it is obviously related.

I’m starting to stray so I’ll end with this. In 3 years I will read my news on a device I carry in my pocket. All of that news will be delivered to me based on choices I have made. Any of that news from major sources will be packaged and designed much like it is in the newspaper today. I will read comments and make my own directly from the application I use to read that news. I will also be able to add to the story by publishing my own images and video directly into that stream of comments which can be filtered to the top by the community and editors.

Also, someone else is going to have to make all this happen. I’m already freakin swamped.