RSS came from the publishing industry?

January 21, 2006 in blogs, feeds

Dave’s a smart guy so I’m sure I’m not following here:

Last night’s conversations were incredibly interesting, the next day I’d like nothing better than to continue them. One thing I wish I had said to Om, so we could have developed the idea (or perhaps he might have disagreed) is my belief that RSS did not come from the tech industry as so many assume — it came from the publishing industry. Why? Well, the ideas in RSS are hardly technologically revolutionary. As many have pointed out, ad nauseum, CDF had some of them, and as you can see in this post from Mary Hodder, there’s no doubt something like it would have come along eventually even if we hadn’t promoted it so aggressively in the late 90s and early 00s.

If wouldn’t have eventually come unless it was pushed.

If the MSM was left to their own accord there would never be feeds. There would be forced registration, robots.txt which blocks everything, horrible invalid HTML, and content without any links.

It’s their version of DRM…

Even today most MSM lacks any sort of “quality” feeds. For the MSM sites that do have feeds they’re generally of horrible quality. They’re not full-content. You’d be lucky to get a summary let alone any rich HTML.

We’re seeing now with MSM what’s being mirrored in the Entertainment industry. They’re being dragged onto the Internet kicking and screaming and they don’t like it. Things are going to have to get worse before they get better.

Update: Dave sent me an email about this pointing out that we’re now part of the publishing industry. Sort of like Apple is part of the music industry. Very Zen…

Update 2: The major question is whether TailRank is a publishing-savvy technology company or a technology-savvy publishing company :)

5 Replies

  1. Susan Mernit

    January 21, 2006 at 7:13 am

    damn right, kevin!

  2. Dave Winer

    January 21, 2006 at 1:28 pm

    Kevin, would it make more sense if you thought of me as part of the publishing industry instead of the tech industry? I think that’s what I was really saying there.

    I think blogging is an act of publishing not an act of technology. And I find I’m always at odds with the tech industry, they’re always interfering with me publishing and serving those who publish.

    I think if you’re going to succeed at what you’re doing, you’re going to have to see yourself as part of the publishing industry too. We’ll talk some more about this, for sure. ;->

  3. Chris Tolles

    January 21, 2006 at 8:47 pm

    RSS came from Dan Libby, Guha Ramanathan and a couple of other folks at Netscape in 1999.

    Since I was there at the time, I’m pretty sure about this.

    Now, one can postulate theories of popularization that spring from here, theories of how RSS and blogging comingle…theories that might involve publishers and educational institution and standardization

    But RSS came from Netscape, a technology company, who introduced a *product* which incorporated RSS and introduced it to publishers like the Red Herring,

    Implementation is the only truth. Engineers at a technology company invented RSS, and everything else happened afterwards.

  4. Kevin Burton

    January 21, 2006 at 9:04 pm

    Chris,

    Netscape gave birth to RSS but gave it up for adoption.

    Netscape did nothing to improve RSS and if it wasn’t for the community it would have died.

    If it wasn’t for RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 (and even the battles within) RSS would be nowhere on the map.

    The question is whether those that adopted RSS are part of the publishing industry even though 99% of them are technologists.

    Technology is just a means to an end…

  5. Chris Tolles

    January 22, 2006 at 9:27 am

    “Come from” seems to me to imply origination…so where did RSS “come from” seems to me needs to at least mention the role Netscape played here.

    >The question is whether those that adopted
    >RSS are part of the publishing industry
    >even though 99% of them are technologists

    …I’d argue that the success of RSS has been powered by folks like bloglines and MyYahoo (The launch of MyYahoo has driven most of the RSS usage that we’re seeing at Topix), with a significant shoutout to SixApart, Firefox and a couple of other folks…

    The argument here smacks me of sophistry around an agenda to deny the clear Silicon Valley origins and key role that Silicon Valley companies have played in the rollout of RSS.

    Yes, publishers are important downstream adoptees of RSS, and yes, bloggers can be viewed as publishers, but I think you’re first reaction to this articles was spot on.

    It’s like arguing that the success of HTML was driven by the retail industry, since e-Commerce has certainly played a large role in the mainstream adoption of the web, and that an act of e-Commerce is an act of shopping, not an act of technology. The guys who invesnted the browser, were, yes, tech industry guys.

    Having a jeremiad against the tech industry is not solid ground for discounting its importance.

    Be proud of your role as a Silicon Valley technologist.

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