Mike Sansone did a BlogTalkRadio show this morning (listen here) that talks about how he gets business people up to speed on RSS, feed readers, and general tips for using RSS efficiently.

One point that Mike made is that non-technical people look at feeds like a microwave… they don’t want to know about the neutrons and the power configuration. They want to know which button to push to make popcorn. The real power of the RSS/Atom story isn’t in how it works, but in what it does for you.

This goes back to Greg Reinacker’s comment in 2005 that “RSS is plumbing.” The specification merits of RSS or Atom will only win over the geekerati. Everybody else just wants to know where the popcorn button is.

So how do we make RSS as easy as microwave popcorn? Personally, I don’t see this happening until every email client - desktop and online - has free, robust support for RSS feeds. The biggest barrier I see in my workplace is resistance to “yet another application to monitor.” If feed items show up with their email, suddenly it isn’t so bad. Unfortunately, few email client feed readers are both good AND free. If GMail ever integrated Google Reader, that would be a killer, killer app.

Now where’s that butter?

Just announced:

A new release of the RSS and Atom Utilities (ROME) project 0.9 (beta) is now available on the project’s Java.net website. This new release includes fixes to Atom relative URI resolution, easier parsing for RSS feeds that use , better support for mapping of RSS to and from Atom and numerous small fixes.

Here are some quick links to the relevant release docs and files.
• Release page
• Change list
• Javadocs

Direct link to downloads:
• rome-0.9.tar.gz
• rome-0.9.zip

See Dave Johnson’s full announcement for more information on what’s included in this release.

Microsoft has released a beta version of UniveRSS to show off Windows Vista’s graphicy goodness. It is a 3D browser for RSS feeds… that’s right, 3D. If you’re scratching your head at the usefulness of that kind of environment, keep scratching.

I scratched, but I couldn’t resist. I don’t have Vista, but IE7 and .NET 3 are enough to get it working on my WinXPSP2 machine. The performance wasn’t great, but it was enough to see what they’re trying to accomplish.

The short story is: They’re showing off some really simple 3D stuff, not an RSS reader. It picks up feeds from your IE7 feeds folder, then displays a spinning cube with the feed’s image displayed on each side. Click the cube to get a in-world browser, and right-click to get out of it again. The browser doesn’t even support the full HTML set from IE7, so formatting is rudimentary.

Minority Report for RSS it aint.

With simplistic 3D presentation and substandard feed presentation, I’m scratching my head on why they released it. I’ll invoke “Remember Its a Beta” from my Microsoft Max RSS experience and give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt, for now.

However, I just don’t think this kind of interface makes for good browsing of RSS and Atom content. 3D space is better for link analysis and exploring hyper-dimensional data that can’t be easily visualized in 2D. (I’m doing just that sort of thing at work right now with Java3D, so I’ve got a little background in this opinion.)

In the meantime, here are some screenshots to let you see what UniveRSS looks like without needing to install it:

The Next Morning Update

It occured to me in the shower this morning that Microsoft probably isn’t trying to show off their 3D skillz, nor an RSS reader, nor a revolutionary way to display information.  They’re providing a demo with source code of Avalon AKA Windows Presentation Foundation.  Now that makes sense.

The technical aspect of redirecting RSS and Atom feeds from one URL to another has been discussed lately, but there is also an issue of etiquette that is worth thinking through. Let me explain…

It has been quiet lately on inkBlots as I’ve been working on a project I intend to announce in a few weeks. More details are forthcoming as things come closer together, but the whole notion centers around a non-profit venue for strong technology-related content that will reach a broader audience than “just my blog.”

My plan at this point is to point the inkBlots feed to the new site, so the transition would be seamless. You would get the same sort of stuff you get on inkBlots, plus (I hope) quite a bit more. Basically, you wouldn’t have to do anything, since the same RSS feed you use now would pull from the new site. (inkBlots would stay behind as an archive, but no longer be updated.)

Technically, this is easy stuff (thanks to FeedBurner.) But what about the etiquette of it?

Is it okay if a feed follows an author to a new site?  Is redirecting a feed to a strongly-related site a reasonable thing to do?  Is it a nice convenience, or does it feel like a bait-and-switch? When is it not okay?  Is announcing intent enough, or should something else be done?
What do you think?

“RSS is the world’s most successful application of XML.”

“The dream of Atom is easy to understand: Every cellphone, every camera, every spreadsheet, every word processor, every browser should now have a ‘Publish File.’”

So says Tim Bray, who is a major contributor to the XML and Atom web standards. He is the Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems.

I spotted mention of a video-taped discussion with Tim Bray at W-JAX where he talks about RSS and Atom… and specifically the appeal of the Atom Publishing Protocol.

I transcribed his comments (starting about 3:20 into the clip) below:

Matthew Langham: What’s your take now, on let’s say, the syndication formats? Have you seen - what sort of outlook do you see for Atom or even for RSS and/or Atom?

Tim Bray: Right, okay, so RSS is the world’s most successful application of XML. You know - immensely, hugely successful. RSS, for simple, human-to-human, news-oriented blog feeds is perfectly satisfactory. It doesn’t work very well for me because I like to write my own XML and use XML syntax characters in my titles, so that blows up RSS readers.

So, the Atom syndication format is getting pretty good uptake. All the major blogging engines now support it - not all by default, but [unintelligible] them support them by default. But the interesting part of Atom is the Publishing Protocol…

So the Publishing Protocol is an incredibly thin very simple layering over HTTP to pushing anything - words, pictures, movies - onto the web. What’s astounding is that we don’t have a good protocol for doing that. The closest thing is WebDAV. But WebDAV, the implementations are shaky, and the problem is that what we want to do is empower everything, starting with these things [holds up cellphone] to be publishing platforms.

And so the big trick about Atom is if you want to put something new on the web, you don’t have to say its name. You just say, “Here’s the text, or here’s the bits for the picture” and the server comes back and says, “Okay, here’s where I put it, here’s the URL for where I put it.” So the server owns all the problems of managing the service…. a much better division of labor.

So the dream of Atom is easy to understand: Every cellphone, every camera, every spreadsheet, every word processor, every browser should now [have] a “Publish File.” You know, [it] should be: “File Save” and “File Publish.” Everything should be publishing-enabled. So Atom is the protocol to underlie that. And I think it’s going to work… you know, Google’s implementing it, Nokia’s going to implement it on the handsets.

The full video on YouTube can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2sh2NV3q7s