I have become a big convert to RSS (Really Simple Syndication/RDF Side Summary- take your pick) recently. My blogroll is 60 newsfeeds long- and I can finally keep up with all my interests.
My trusty RSS reader goes and fetches the latest newsfeeds every few hours or so (it's configurable). RSS newsfeeds and blogs remind me somewhat of the good old days of usenet, when I would wait for my newsreader to load up stuff from the various comp.lang/comp.unix newsgroups I had subscribed to. I stopped using usenet about six years back, when the 'noise' became intolerable, and I had to wade through a bunch of newbie questions to get to useful stuff. With RSS, since I select the feeds I subscribe to, its like a usenet newsgroup where I control the list of authors whose posts I want to see.
So what happens if everyone becomes a RSS convert like me? A recent Wired article discusses the effect on Internet traffic when this happens.
Already there are RSS readers that function from inside mail programs (Newsgator) or browsers(RSS Reader Panel, Aggreg8, NewsMonster)- and if this becomes a default 'feature' in IE/Outlook, it can drive a huge amount of traffic to a website. Unlike normal web browsing, a RSS reader visits a web site multiple times a day.
The article goes on to say what you can do about it- don't include a lot of content in the RSS feed- a headline, a couple of sentences and a URL is all that should be sent. If the reader is interested, [s]he can then visit the site for more information. This will help, but a bunch of buggy RSS readers (ones that dont check for changed content, or dont do it properly), or misconfigured readers (ones that look for changes very frequently) can still cause a lot of trouble. It would be interesting to see a solution to this, when it does become a real problem.
Posted by vivek at May 3, 2004 02:55 PM | TrackBack