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e enjte qershor 17, 2004
A few interesting posts about the future of RSS aggregators RSS aggregation, wether on the client or on the server is a hot topic these days.
I'm myself really excited about this area: this is why my team released the Rome RSS/Atom java library on java.net 2 weeks ago.
In the past few days I've seen a few posts in various weblogs or sites that point in the right direction.
My favorite is Phil Ringnalda's post That old hopeful feeling.
The main theme of the post is how badly supported republishing os done in the current crop of aggregators. I couldn't agree more. My own information consumption and generation practices have evolved with the tools I've used: I initially used Radio Userland. I used the included aggregator, that displayed the feeds in an IE browser window, and ctrl-clicked the POST button in front of all interesting entries. Then I would go through all the new browser windows, remove some of the text of the item, italicize the part I wanted to quote, add a comment in the IE only editor, then post the stuff to my Radio weblog. Then I moved to Movable Type and NetNewsWire to read feeds. Here double clicked on interesting items to read them in Mozilla or Firefox, and either use the blog poster from NetNewsWire, or the MT admin UI to post them. But as time went by I blogged less and less and ended up pushing many single links to my de.licio.us linkblog. I haven't found the perfect workflow yet, but NetNewsWire begins to show its limits, and I haven't found the perfect blog server for my personal blog yet.
One quote in his post that rings a bell for me is:
Not one of them says anything about having any real interest in the format used to deliver the feeds they consume. Why would they? That's a library function, parsing feeds and normalizing them into native data structures. It's the data that's interesting, not the format that you never see.
This is exactly why we started the Rome project!
Then Russel Beattie who's one of my favorite java bloggers, has this very good post Weblog Systems vs. Aggregators finally realizes that aggregators, especially server side ones, are the important part of the blogging toolset today, and talks about writing his own: just use Rome to parse your feeds Russ:-)
Last, at O'Reilly, in RSS: The Next Generation Giles Turnbull reviews 3 Mac OS X client side aggregators: NetNewsWire, Shrook and PulpFiction. NetNewsWire defined the genre, PulpFiction steals Apple Mail UI and adds archving, and Shrook steals Apple's iTunes UI and adds an interesting server side feed list and distributed checkin. I've tried them all, and still use NetNewsWire, but think the most satisfying solution will come from a server side solution. PulpFiction is not very interesting: a server side RSS to mail gateway will let you use your regular mail client to view feeds and apply filters. Shrook has the most interesting ideas, with keeping the feed list on the server side, but today the protocol for that is not open so you have to use their server.
This is an area where I think we're lacking a standard: I think the future is in server side aggregators, but people may want to still use their client side aggregator in certain situations. In order for this to work we need a standard protocol to reconcile feed lists from both sides. I was thinking about using SyncML for the protocol, to reconcile differences between the OPML files on both sides. I'll propose the idea to Brent Simmons, who made NetNewsWire.
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This is a personal weblog, I do not speak for my employer.
Posted by Russ on qershor 17, 2004 at 04:43 MD PDT #
Posted by Patrick Chanezon on qershor 18, 2004 at 08:31 PD PDT #