My column on RSS, which noted how poor a name the acronym is, sparked a good discussion over at John Battelle’s blog about how to find a better name.
And I note (thanks to Lockergnome for the link) that Amy Gahran of Contentious has a contest going for a new name.
Jeremy Zawodny makes the same point I was trying to make, in a slightly different way:
In 2004, RSS is going to go mainstream–and it’s going to happen in a big way. Remember when you first starting seeing URLs appear on billboards and at the end of movie trailers? So do I. It’s going to be like that. One day we’re just going to look around and realize that RSS is popping up all over the place. And a couple years later, we’ll all wonder how we ever got along without it. |
Finally, Dru (no last name provided) wrote in to say, “RSS is not push, it is all pull. And that is extremely important… Any time an RSS reader goes to check on a feed, it pulls down a copy from the given url.”
He’s absolutely right, in terms of the technical meaning. However, from the user’s standpoint RSS provides essentially what “push” promised but delivered only with great, painful effort: dynamic notification of new stuff to read. So, though I stand corrected in my use of the term, I think the analogy still holds.
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