RSS vs. The Web
I meant to say something about the whole RSS joke last week. (I thought Leslie Harpold was in on it too but I can’t find her pseudo xml page. Anyways, you get the idea.)
What were their real reasons for the joke? Michael Sippey suggests that it may have been a “sly comment on the depersonalized nature of rss-based ‘site’ syndication.” Jason Kottke notes those who think everyone’s site should be accessible via an RSS reader have a limited perspective. And Anil Dash wonders why isn’t there a way to syndicate his entries without butchering the way they look?
None of the participants have real RSS feeds on their sites. (Update: Soon after this entry was posted, a reader pointed out that some of the participants do have RSS feeds.)
I agree with Jason Kottke’s point that it’s limiting to believe everyone’s site should have an RSS feed. However, it doesn’t hurt to have one. It doesn’t take anything away from the design to have one. It just gives readers another option for getting to the content. And isn’t The Content what blogging is all about? Sure, the way your entries look and the minimalist design of your blog is important, but without the content your blog is just a shell of a website.
- 24 Sep 02
- anil dash, content, fun, jason kottke, rss, visual design, web design
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Comments
Some of the participants do have feeds: Kottke, Stating the Obvious, and Q Daily News.
Rogers Cadenhead on 26 Sep 02
I’ve got an RSS feed, too. Heh.
Anil on 30 Sep 02
Okay, so some of the participants did have feeds at the time of the joke. I wrote the entry a little too quickly without doing much searching. But why should finding RSS feeds require a lot of searching? If you have an RSS feed, why bury the link deep in your about page or even worse, deep in your archives? I guess I mistakenly assumed that RSS feeds were something that the authors wanted people to find. Or would that be too easy?
Joshua on 30 Sep 02
It’s buried because the few readers who care will look for it, and more importantly, because the RSS auto-discovery metatag is there, which means software like Newszcrawler can discover it for you automatically, the way it *ought* to work.
Anil on 3 Oct 02