The Navel of Narcissus

I didn't get Really Simple Syndication RSS until I installed NetNewsWire on my 15-inch flat panel iMac at home. It's very convenient to be able to track the new content on several favorite sites from one central application. BBC, The Register, and Slashdot all supply RSS feeds.

I hear the latest version of the RSS spec is starting to allow more than text content and I wonder where that will lead. If RSS channels can contain HTML, then doesn't an aggregator like NetNewsWire start to become a lot more like a browser? So wouldn't you want to use a browser for handling your RSS channels? And if channels become graphical, then doesn't dealing with RSS channels become sort of like dealing with channels in a portal server? Does this mean that RSS readers are going to become the moral equivalent of client-side, personal portal servers?

If that's the case, then why not do all of your RSS aggregation and management in a real, server-side portal server instead? That way, you can leverage the existing technology, and -- more important -- you can access your RSS feeds from any location and any device? Right now, my aggregator is stuck on my Mac at home, which is pretty limiting. (2004-06-07 11:33:21.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Comments:

Pushing all of the aggregation to a server is done today - look at http://planetsun.org for an example. On the other hand you need to provide remote access control to add feeds, change update rates, and so forth, and of course everyone sharing that aggregation sees the same collection. And finally the presentation is limited to what the browser can show you: you don't get raw access to the RDF. That may be an issue. In general, for any client-side web application one can create a server-side version that you access through a browser. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily the best approach. I love being able to use NetNewsWireLite on my PB wherever I am, and to cache stuff for offline browsing (which is why the Register rocks and the Inquirer sucks, along with other headline-only feeds).

Posted by Geoff Arnold on June 07, 2004 at 04:38 PM EDT #