RSS feedLooks like the feed vs. content penny is finally starting to drop. Yesterday Robert Scoble spoke about the real RSS debates, but while his four serious fights are limited to simple RSS clarifications (or failings), unknowingly highlighting Atom’s plight, he did have this to say:
On the second, feed producers should ALWAYS leave the reader in control. Please, no special fonts, no special colored backgrounds, no CSS, no branding. Thank you. Why? It’s easier to read. Imagine if the New York Times put a different font on each article.
The first sentence is a bit of a misnomer, regarding the perception that we have control, which I’ve spoken about previously (here and here). Sure, changing presentation styles, and our ability to selectively subscribe to a feed is a kind of control, but is not the control we think of when we talk about control of the publishing pipeline. Somehow this message has been lost in the blogospheric melee that was RSS vs. Atom.
I’ve highlighted the last sentence though, and I’m hoping that Robert can see the extent of what he’s saying, but finally we’re seeing A-listers starting to talk beyond feeds, and about content for content’s sake. The New York Times analogy is a good one, and one which I regularly use to explain syndication technologies like RSS. It is similar to the InfoWorld example from the other day, only the newspaper view is the next step towards removing the business model embellishments (i.e. advertisements) that piss us off, from the content. Now if only I could walk into a newsagent and buy the Richard BF Times, which contains only the pure content that I’m really interested in, confident in knowing that I’ve captured every single news item that is relevant to me. Not the simple high profile items that currently populate the big media’s crippled RSS feeds, but content that is useful to me, without my having to jump through dozens of fancy aggregator AI hoops to get it. I’d pay a dollar a day, would you?
Although, today, Robert is advocating interwoven and almost indistinguishable advertising and content as a good business model, which seems like a contradiction of no special fonts, no special colored backgrounds, no CSS, no branding to me, but maybe I’m reading too much into it. Perhaps the penny is still falling, but it is certainly starting to pick up pace.
The content is coming, you can feel it.
(Originally posted to Synop weblog)