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The RSS Pushmepullyu

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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.

The paper chase

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Robert X. Cringely’s technology commentary on the PBS Web site is always entertaining, sometimes off-the-wall, occasionally unreliable, and every now and then so right-on it’s frightening. His piece on the voting machine mess falls into that last category:

  Diebold makes a lot of ATM machines. They make machines that sell tickets for trains and subways. They make store checkout scanners, including self-service scanners. They make machines that allow access to buildings for people with magnetic cards. They make machines that use magnetic cards for payment in closed systems like university dining rooms. All of these are machines that involve data input that results in a transaction, just like a voting machine. But unlike a voting machine, every one of these other kinds of Diebold machines — EVERY ONE — creates a paper trail and can be audited. Would Citibank have it any other way? Would Home Depot? Would the CIA? Of course not.

New column: Ode to RSS

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Since starting this blog my output of regular columns has declined, but I’m back, tonight, with an ode to RSS. This will be old hat to many reading here, but for the wider world of Salon’s readers and beyond, RSS remains a novelty worth introducing with a fanfare.

Google pump-and-dump or Microsoft FUD attack?

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The New York Times reported that Microsoft talked to Google about acquiring the company. Bill Gates denied the report. Who’s lying? Dan Gillmor walks us through the possibilities. Dan sounds like he thinks it’s more likely that the lie emanates from the Google side, since Gates, as a public-company chairman, has to follow some pretty strict rules — and the investors who are plotting an IPO for Google have a “pump and dump” incentive to talk up Google’s prospects.

I dunno. Google was a pretty hot item before anyone read any headlines about a Microsoft acquisition. Anything is possible here, but Microsoft has a long history of FUD — sowing “fear, uncertainty and doubt” — and concern about regulatory wrist-slaps would not seem high on the list in Redmond in the wake of the Bush administration’s roll-over-and-die approach to the Microsoft antitrust settlement.

Worlds within worlds

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Great piece by Greg Costikyan on the philosophical question of whether MMGs (massively multiplayer games) are games at all — or something new in the way of imaginary-world creations:

 

There and Second Life both claim that they aren’t games. The reason they claim not to be games, of course, is that their creators are under the delusion that they will increase their potential audience by making this claim, since games are for geeks, and they want to create MMGs for “the rest of us.” The idea being that only geeks play games, a small percentage of the population are geeks, ergo, to create a 3D world that achieves a mass audience, you must create one that isn’t a game.

Let’s start with the assumption that only geeks play games. This is patently false.

Greg’s an experienced game designer, and he takes the long view, with a historical perspective that goes all the way back to Habitat — arguing that, if you’re designing an MMG, you’d better make it a good game, or people won’t want to spend time in it.

For a somewhat different perspective, Salon contributor Wagner James Au has been serving as a kind of in-world reporter/blogger over at Second life. His Notes from within that MMG make for a fascinating glimpse inside one virtual play-space.

Two cheers for Bloglines

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In my continued exploration of the pressing question, “Can RSS help me keep up with the vast numbers of blogs I want to read?”, I’m also trying out Bloglines. Instead of pulling RSS feeds together in a client on your machine, Bloglines uses a web-based, server-side approach: You upload your subscription list and then you can log in from anywhere to check your subscriptions. It’s smartly designed; my one complaint — and one reason I’ll probably stick with Radio for now — is that, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t let you aggregate postings from all your subscribed blogs onto one page that you can scan. Instead, you get two panes — a window on the left with folders for each subscribed blog, and a window on the right with the postings for the selected folder.

Why don’t I like this? Well, for me, the labor-saving aspect of an RSS aggregator is that I don’t have to click on one bookmark after another in my browser to check the blogs I want to check. I want to scroll down one long page (which is what Radio gives me). Why would I want my aggregator to make me click on one folder after another to catch up with my subscriptions? Isn’t that awfully close to the way my browser works? Put everything on one page for me — or at least give me that choice. Since Bloglines is a relatively new service and it shows every sign of having been carefully designed with the user in mind (Mark Fletcher’s blog tracks its progress), I can only hope that it will offer this feature at some point.
Addendum Oscar Bartos points out in the comments that Bloglines does offer the one-page view, though it’s not intuitively obvious or called out in any way. I’m going to live with it for a few days but I think I’ve found my RSS home, at least for now…

Critical information overload

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Provocative piece in today’s Wall Street Journal by Dennis K. Berman talks about the growing demands on our informational intake, noting the phenomena of “surfer’s voice” (the distracted conversational tone of someone who’s paying more attention to a computer screen than to the voice at the other end of the phone), “absent presence” (cellphone users paying more attention to the voice at the other end than to their physical surroundings), and other anthropological artifacts of our multitasked world.

People have been lamenting the impact of informational overload and “Data Smog” (in David Shenk’s phrase) for a long time, of course. Today what we’re suffering from is the layering of too many simultaneous incompatible channels of incoming information: E-mail is only the tip of the iceberg. Instant messaging ups the on-screen ante. Cell phones are now considered a necessity of life.

One response the Journal piece chronicles is the desire to set certain times aside for meditation — an update of the Sabbath concept. But one interviewee, a daily meditator, sheepishly admits, “I check my e-mail before I meditate.”

I think the article was on the right track in pointing out that some of the problem, at least, is not the result of ineluctable and anti-humane attention-deficit-disorder-inducing Evil inherent in our technology but rather simply a side-effect of the technology’s immaturity: “All the data we receive are still ghettoized… We could use, instead, programs that will break down those walls, helping people keep their train of thought while they switch back and forth between different projects and devices.”

The creation of a Grand Unified Personal Information Flow isn’t going to happen overnight, but people are working on it: Mitch Kapor’s Chandler project is one key effort. No doubt the folks at Microsoft working on Longhorn feel that this is part of what they’re aiming for, too.

The ideology of the PC revolution always talked about empowering the individual, and that remains a good yardstick for success or failure in the arena of personal-information management tools. Are you in control of your e-mail or is it controlling you? Does your cell phone help you get things done or does it keep getting in the way?

This all works on a subtler level, too, since the accelerated communication channels computer networks provide also shape the kinds of things that are easier to get done. The technophobic critique has always been that our digital tools promote instant gratification over long-term effort. That’s true, up to a point. But — given human willpower and ingenuity — the same tools can be marshalled toward long-term projects, too. Just look at Howard Dean’s campaign for an example: All those blogs and e-mail messages and Meetups are aligned toward a goal that is a year away.

RSS to go

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As part of my own ongoing (and often losing) battle to work more efficiently I’m experimenting with trying to read as many of the 100-plus blogs I try to follow using an RSS aggregator. For those readers who are still in the dark about this whole concept — and, despite the excitement in the blogosphere about RSS, an awful lot of people still know nothing about what it is — the idea is that, instead of calling up blog after blog in your Web browser to see what’s new, you have a program on your computer that periodically checks “feeds” from those blogs to find out if they’ve got new posts, and collects headlines from those that do so you can peruse them in one place (and click through to those you want to read).

I posted about my own preferences for RSS use recently, and got some helpful responses. Over the weekend, I took John Robb’s advice (thanks, John!) and installed a version of Radio on my laptop to use solely as an aggregator. I’ll keep reporting here on my experiences. So far I’m finding it helpful, though I’m noticing that certain blogs’ feeds are idiosyncratic in ways that I’m not finding helpful: For example, Josh Marshall’s doesn’t actually link to the story that’s being teased; and the feed from Radio Free Blogistan includes a brief headline but no excerpt from the post, making it harder to figure out what the post is about.

Is there an aggregator in the house?

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I love the RSS aggregator in Radio Userland and I use it all the time. But it’s on a desktop computer that is not conveniently accessible outside the Salon network. So I’m looking for an aggregator that I can install on my laptop (it’s a Windows machine) to take my feeds with me wherever I go. I like the “all on one page” format of Radio rather than the multipane, RSS-headlines-like-emails-in-Outlook approach of so many popular aggregators. I found Amphetadesk, which seems to suit my needs.

However as far as I can tell it’s missing one critical feature of the Radio aggregator: in Radio, the aggregator presents you with a whole mess of items to read, and you can easily delete them with one click once you’ve read the page. Then you won’t waste time the next go-round looking at stuff you’ve already read. This adds a huge level of efficiency to the whole process.

Is there any other aggregator out there that pulls all your feeds onto a single browser page — and lets you delete-as-you-read?