It's RSS day here at TSL! Well, I suppose every day is RSS day at TSL since I couldn't possibly maintain my site without it, but an article over at the American Press Institute is also singing its praises:

The Next Front[ier] in the Disruption of Traditional Media

"RSS, an acronym for Really Simple Syndication is a Web content syndication format. It's a form of XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which means that each piece of data — headline, byline and story — is coded separately so that a program or Web page will know exactly what to do with it.

By including a simple piece of code in a Web page, sites can offer headlines from national news sites such as BBC.com and NYTimes.com, magazines such as Salon.com and journal headlines from favorite bloggers, from MacRumors to Boing Boing.

But the power of RSS goes beyond websites to applications that are designed to parse headlines from numerous sources — a mix of media customized completely by the reader. Called 'news aggregators,' these are small desktop applications that let you read headlines from dozens or hundreds of news sites....

Building an RSS output is no problem from most Web-publishing systems already in use by news media sites. (Most sites output to multiple templates; this is just another template.) But few commercial news sites have done so — until recent weeks....

So why create RSS feeds from your site if there's no immediate ROI?

A few thoughts:

• It's emergent. RSS feeds and news aggregators are today what Web browsers were in 1996. It's a new publishing platform, and it's already the de-facto format used by the Web's early adopters.
• It's effortless. Any database-publishing system that can output Web pages can output RSS feeds. No staff time beyond creating a basic template = very little expense.
• It's migrating. RSS feeds now find their way onto Web pages and news aggregators. Apple's new calendar application, iCal, allows users to syndicate events — ranging from personal get-togethers to DVD release dates and sporting events. Headlines are not far behind.
• It's multi-platform. News aggregators are a much better fit for low-bandwidth browsers on mobile phones, PDAs and tablets.
• It's the Classifieds, stupid. Most of the RSS community is focused on content. That's great; so was the early Web. But feeding classified ads to aggregators is the next obvious step, and will prove to be hugely profitable for newspapers — or whoever decides to do it first.
• Fear Factor. Let's face it: Fear is why most newspapers first went online — afraid Microsoft, AOL or Joe Blow was going to steal market share. Not having your content available in a medium that is growing in popularity rather than waning may not have immediate ROI, but the long-term prognosis for such ignorance is death.

Most importantly, the cost of not offering your site's content via RSS news aggregators is in becoming irrelevant. I currently subscribe to more than 20 RSS feeds on my NetNewsWire aggregator. Three come from traditional news-media companies. The rest are offered by hobbyists and niche publishers.

These feeds are no less interesting, insightful or engaging than the mainstream media feeds. These self-syndicated writers have become part of my daily media habit. A Big Media Company hoping to get on my deck will start in 20th place and will need to beat out the new breed of syndicated writers.

Best of luck." [via JD's New Media Musings]

Yeah, what he said! I used to read the Chicago Tribune online, but now I read the Sun-Times in my aggregator because someone is scraping it. I rarely had time to check the NY Times technology section every day, but now I get the headlines as soon as they're posted. Something happening in world events? I see it in my aggregator before I ever make it to my car to hear it on the radio (which I don't listen to anymore anyway) or make it home to catch the news (which I don't watch much of anymore since I get far more in-depth information online). I also don't have to keep flitting back to online news sites. Instead I get all of my news on one web page that updates automatically for me.

And the classifieds idea is indeed a killer app. I subscribe to a few such feeds, like TechBargains, and I was going to make a purchase because of one yesterday (unfortunately the product had already sold out!). What I'd really love is more local news.

Where Next for RSS?

"People who hang around with bloggers all know what RSS is (if you don't, I'll introduce it.) RSS is headed for some interesting times as regards client software, traffic management, and business model, and it would be reasonable to expect some breakage along the way.

RSS FOR THE UNINITIATED: The history of RSS is fraught and complicated and I'm not going there. To summarize, RSS is a little XML language that you use to describe changes in a web site. Usually this is called an 'RSS feed'. Then all kinds of different programs can read the RSS feed and give you clickable news summaries that mean you don't actually have to visit all those websites unless you know there's something there you want to read.

Most people, once they start using RSS to check the news, just don't go back, the amount of time and irritation saved is totally, completely addictive....

When I turn on my laptop in the morning, NetNewsWire goes out and scans 21 RSS feeds. Then it checks up on them at 30-minute intervals after that (this is configurable). I don't know how typical that is, but I know there are people who track way more than I do. There's a problem here - if RSS becomes as wildly popular as a lot of prognosticators (including me) predict, there is going to be an ungodly traffic bulge every morning, and then at half-hour intervals all day.

People who read RSS through web-based products like the Userland offering are going to present a much smaller load to the sites providing the RSS. But I think that RSS-reading is going to get wired into Mozilla and IE and Safari and people will just do it from their desktop.

Fortunately, I think the Web's caching mechanisms will hold up under the load assuming everyone plays by the rules. Unfortunately, at the moment we're not...

I hate to be a wet blanket but I just don't see RSS readers persisting for too long as a standalone application class, this stuff just belongs in the browser. It will take a couple of years for it to get cooked into mainstream browsers in a mature enough form to be usable, so the guys with the RSS-reader software should make hay while the sun shines and start figuring out their Next Big Thing.

RSS was driven by the Weblog-technology companies and I suspect they'll continue to do just fine, Weblogging ain't going away any time soon. Also, anyone who does any kind of publishing software had better start offering a real-easy-to-use RSS interface and sooner rather than later or they're just not going to be in the game." [Textuality, via WebReference]

Emphasis above is totally mine. I'm up to something like 175 feeds in my aggregator, and it scans once an hour.

I can't say "me, too" loudly or often enough. I'm a big believer in RSS (in fact, I've based our entire grant project on it), and I agree that RSS readers will go mainstream and become background like browsers. In fact at this rate, I think RSS will make great headway with PDA and cell phone browsers first. I think there's a huge future for multimedia enclosures in RSS. My plan is to revolutionize communication between Illinois Library Systems using RSS.

Resistance is futile! Bwahahahahahahaha