Mark Fletcher, Scott Rafer, Bob Wyman on Tomorrow’s RSS
(prior to this presentation Julie Leung gave an incredible presentation on Blogging as Social Tool – it was so good, I stopped writing and sat there, with the rest of the gang, in rapt attention. Check out her blog here.
Scott Rafer (feedster) SE for blogs and rss (ads in rss feeds) – how is rss evolving??? – surprised in how little it has evolved over the last few years. Fewer extensions and namespaces. Turning into a real business, only large economics can change the format. Large Publisherss (rss-only publishers) can change and rss on mobile phones is the next big thing (even friendlier and already there in some cases)
Mark Fletcher bloglines is about signup, subscribe, what you have read and havent. Accessible from any machine – webbased. No innovation in terms of extensions to rss. We see rss as enabling – the universal inbox – any info in the inbox format. Notifications and things you havent read before,. Adopted in different areas and different data even if there arent extensions for it. Continuing and seeing rss in all diff things (flight status, package tracking) adopting new forms of what this can do continues
Bob Wyman – PubSub – prospective search (love the idea). Store queries/evaluate documentss/ match to queries (persistant).
2 things in the future of rss. Rss not just for text anymore. Power and great things you can do with text. Beginning to understand what its all about. A lot more nontext – structured publishing, microformats, structured blogging, just as bloglines does jobs and package tracking, feedster does job, pubsub does airport status, earthquakes, SEC filings, more kinds of structured data. Events are cool, able to pub events in the blog and have them distributed thru many search engines. 2nd trend – RSS (Really Simple) future of RSS isnt RSS – future is Atom. (holy crap were there giggles here. Format vendors and people have an interst in the blogging space can work on. Not have been able to address cust needs in past(rss). All aggregators can read all the formats – it is time to move on to ATOM. People are giggling – the crowd doesnt agree.
Mark – Aggregators – need to be switzerland – support everythign for better or worse. Mix- doesnt matter. So much momentum it will never go away.
Scott – feeds go into and out of validation. Problem not getting more elegantly solved quickly. gonna go where the user asks them to. Again – swtizerland
Bob Wyman – read and write all formats. Thats what users demand. Work has been done by the IETF has insure atom provides more flex and more variety. (giggles again)
Mark – pubs dont need to provide in mult formats. whatever format you pub in people will read… just confuse people. do just 1
Doug- Beat on the aggregator guys to support the formats. Publishers should publish in whatever format with whatever it is you want to express. Aggregator developers need to be fixing the bugs… duplicate feeds are new bugs
Geeknewscentral.com – rss dup feeds issues – 95% are pulling rss, 5% are pulling atom. Atom loses (some clapping)
Dave Winer (I think) Postels law – conservative in what you send and liberal in what you recieve.
The Crowd: How do we monetize RSS – as a content publisher?
Scott – ads for web searchers=google… what is the subscriber mindset – there are expectations. Matching a marketing effort to them makes sense. Ads in feeds. Clickthru rates have been good.
Mark – several diff models for content producers. NYT uses excerpts to draw to site, and then ads. Others with full feeds and no advertising – use rss to show expertise in a field. Others use rss with ads.
Bob – need to have advertising in the feeds. Poeple out there who provide services and need to get paid for what we do – svcs which are good enough valuable enoguh and worth getitng paid for it. Most likely way to get paid is advertising. – doesnt ruin the user experience.
Nial — all companies are only 2-3 years old – would they all do it again?
Feedster – YES, but could have waited a bit longer, site would have been incrementally better
Bloglines – YES – would have changed the name – struggling since the beginning – work on something that people are passionate about is fun – everyone is going to need whether they know it or not – still pretty early
PubSub – YES – only thing is a little lit sooner.