RSS and webcasting
Now I know why I started to feel a little deja vu coming on when I finally twigged onto RSS's rise to prominience. It's webcasting come back to haunt us.
Some of us remember the non-event that was webcasting back in the heady days of the Netscape/Internet Explorer Wars. Netscape had Netcaster and Microsoft had Active Channels (there was so many "Active" products from Microsoft in those days that I initially thought "ActiveX" was a joke based on their naming scheme). Everyone was very excited about who would win the war (they both had incompatible channel formats of course), and there was much serious discussion about how terrible it was that news sites had to support both.
And then it all just faded away, probably because it was a classic solution-looking-for-a-problem technology that no one actually wanted. And also because there wasn't much interesting content: it was designed around the idea that big news sites would use it rather than as a grassroots tech.
Now we have the grassroots rise of RSS, which provides 90% of webacasting and which people actually want and use.
Some of us remember the non-event that was webcasting back in the heady days of the Netscape/Internet Explorer Wars. Netscape had Netcaster and Microsoft had Active Channels (there was so many "Active" products from Microsoft in those days that I initially thought "ActiveX" was a joke based on their naming scheme). Everyone was very excited about who would win the war (they both had incompatible channel formats of course), and there was much serious discussion about how terrible it was that news sites had to support both.
And then it all just faded away, probably because it was a classic solution-looking-for-a-problem technology that no one actually wanted. And also because there wasn't much interesting content: it was designed around the idea that big news sites would use it rather than as a grassroots tech.
Now we have the grassroots rise of RSS, which provides 90% of webacasting and which people actually want and use.
posted by Matthew Phillips at
10:38 am
1 Comments:
Yes, it's always the way: the more standards the better. I don't know much about RSS, but I have seen a few commentators decrying it for being crufty, eg for using escaped HTML markup inside XML (this article in particular).
I assume Atom is more elegant and that's why Blogger supports it as its only syndication format (I have to use a 3rd party site, feedburner, to make an RSS from the Atom feed). But I think RSS may have already won the mindshare/brand recognition war.
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Matthew Phillips, at 1:57 pm
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