I was having a bit of a play with realtime RSS over on my wordpress.com blog earlier today – which got me thinking… Does this mean that ye olde blogging will become cool again?
While distributed approaches to realtime updates like RSSCloud and pubsubhubbub be architecturally superior and more scalable than centralised serivces like twitter, I kinda doubt it. My optimism for the potential of distributed publishing platforms (like old-school blogs, rss feeds and aggregators) dampens each time some new fangled central service like myspace, facebook or twitter comes along. Anyone else noticed how hard it is to get a discussion going in the blogs these days? Find yourself tweeting every time you publish a blog post??
While I doubt that blogging regularly and subscribing widely will ever be as fruitful as it once was, I’m looking forward to see what these new realtime extensions bring to that experience – which has served me well for over five years now. While we wait here are some of my thoughts from my earlier post today:
My RSS feed now realtime tks to wordpress.com for implementing rsscloud
September 15, 2009 by mseyfang
Having just clued-in to the latest on realtime RSS reading about TypePad implementing the alternative pubsubhububb I set out to find out what is required to get this happening on my wordpress blog. If you host your own you need to install the plug-in. On wordpress.com tis already implemented – take a look at the source of my RSS feed and search for ‘cloud’.
What’s the big deal. Well to paraphrase TechCrunch – it is now possible to de-centralise realtime, which means we might finally get some of the cool stuff back from centralised services like twitter.
This could also mean the beginning of a new format war for the real-time web, reminiscent of the old RSS vs Atom battles. Another groups of developers, lead by Brad Fitzpatrick, published a format and cloud hub known as pubsubhubbub
, which is now being supported by Google Reader. There is sure to be much discussion of Wordpress.com falling into the RSSCloud camp, and which protocol/format/method etc. is better than the other (a debate we will engage in on this blog, no doubt).
Services such as Twitter and Friendfeed centralize real-time data and updates. RSSCloud and broader support of such a protocol is a step in the direction of decentralizing such services.
Fang – Mike Seyfang
Tags: pubsubhububb, rsscloud
technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang
1 response so far ↓
1
Dave
// Sep 15, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Realtime RSS. Funny how I got notice of this after searching your entries on Twitter. I had my reader closed so effectively I was offline to any realtime RSS … even if my [client based] reader knew to pull in feed.
Is this a move back to ‘Push’ rather than ‘Pull’?
Without looking too deeply the only thing I see this serves best is service-service communication rater than service-user – unless of course said user is on a realtime app. So guess that means its good news for a mobile connected future.
But I’m not so sure it effects blogging in its purest form any. Or blog reading, unless you sit glued to one site all time – oh like Facebook users! :)
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