It’s all happening at Dawe Winer’s. The Who subscribes to my feed thing is a nice idea, more powerful, though, is the idea of subscribing to OPML files.
Imagine Jenny the Librarian managing a set of librarian feeds for programmers. Or Taegan Goddard keeping a set of political feeds for people who want to watch all the campaigns. Scripting News: 1/8/2004
I’m still waiting for the big RSS revolution. Last year I started preaching a bit, but didn’t really put enough of an effort into it. That’s gotta change. RSS is powerful and for all of us using it, nearly impossible not to have. To a point where I don’t really read sites without them. In the last couple of days I’ve found quite a lot of really interesting blogs … that I already know I’ll forget in a day or two. Which is a shame.
What we need is feeds on all the blogging tools, some sort of standard help text on those stupid, orange XML buttons which continue to puzzle non-techies and a central (or at least just reasonable) “What is an aggregator and where can I find one” page (I know of a few, but we still all need to make some use of them). And maybe the styling of the XML-files themselves so that they don’t come up as comple gibberish would be an idea to implement.
All this just to say, that for RSS and OPML to become truly useful, we need to get everyone to use it. Email wouldn’t be fun either, if only the techies had access. Subscribing to trusted people’s OPML is hard to explain when RSS, aggregators etc. have to be introduced at the same time. RSS preachers, any suggestions?