RSS, the Internet and the Past/Present/Future of News
News delivery has evolved so much, possible more than any other technology.
Obviously if you go back a thousand years, all people had was word of mouth. Extremely unreliable since people prefer to tell things "in their own words" and extremely slow, it could take weeks or months before villages heard news from afar.
One day somebody invents the printing press and now news is (more) reliable and can be shared faster. Next you have the radio and now news can be spread nearly across the US in 1 sweep very affordably and daily. Then a minor upgrade called the TV (which I hope none of you watch too much of) but more importantly we get cable which eventually has "news networks" where you can now get news in a matter of hours/minutes as it happens.
Next you have the Internet which allows you to get news even faster, and more personalized (somewhat) and news can be metered on a less than 60 minute scale.
The epiphany to all of this is the next step, and that's RSS. For the n00bs that don't know, RSS is an XML format that defines news tidbits in a file. Ideally an RSS reader checks an RSS'd url every X minutes/seconds. So instead of you manually going to the news, the news can come to you. Obviously a web coder can code his RSS feed to even customize the news you get, so instead of getting just any news, you get only the news you want. When you use a program like FeedReader you can get little popups from your system tray (very un-intrusive like Outlook 2003 systray popups) so you don't even have to check the program to see if recent news is out. While RSS isn't anything new, what is new is that lately browsers are taking it more seriously. I recall plugin for Mozilla were in the works and if I recall, Firefox/Mozilla might have added built in RSS support. I believe Opera is starting to finally take RSS serious too but unfortunately, neither one of these browsers is popular.
Fortunately a major browser is finally taking that serious, and that's the upcoming version of Safari for the Mac. Unfortunately Apple has become extremely greedy since it launched OS10 (that or development costs for OS10 are sky high) as it seems you'll be required to upgrade to their newest OS revision (aka Mac service pack) which is known as Tiger. While I won't deviate but for a second, Tiger is VERY advanced and is offering features we won't see until Longhorn. Although I'm not too jealous because if I was as hardcore with Macs as I were with PCs, I would have purchased OS10 when it was new at $139 then purchased each upgrade, which I believe was $139 each, and including Tiger that would have meant OS10.4 would have cost me a whopping $556 which is too rich for my tastes for just an OS. I'll be very happy with my free XP SP2 thank you very much :)
But I won't deny Apple is ahead of the game (abandoning your previous user base and hardware compatibility makes that easier, let's be honest). I plan on grabbing a copy and testing it out here at work.
But back to the subject on hand, I really hope MS realizes that RSS will be a major part of the future of the net for not only news, but perhaps things like pushing software patch announcements, appointments, new music announcements from your favorite artists, etc. I really hope we see some kind of IE7 (we'll get to that in my next post) with native RSS support, and something more slick than a dull left hand bar that allows me to type a RSS url and a I get a list. The people want something fun looking, those dull bars may be enough for searching and history but not for new technologies.