A new purpose for RSS

I used to host at Dear Diary. Great service, provided for free. But now I host my own blog (thanks to the good folks at Movable Type and Dion (thanks for the tip, Dion), and I have total control over posting. I did use a simple CGI blog tool for a while, but Movable Type is quite feature rich. It generates RSS feeds from postings automatically.

I’m not sure what RSS really stands for, but it’s simple in concept. It’s an XML standard for making site content changes known to the world. It’s basically like those ‘what’s new’ announcements that appear on websites, but automatically generated and usually automatically picked up and formatted for human consumption (or aggregated). It takes over some of the functionality of those ‘sign me up to be notified of changes to this site’ email lists because, if you point your aggregator at a website’s RSS feed, you’ll be automatically
notified when there are changes–no need to clutter up your inbox. It also subsumes some of the functionality of bookmarks, because, again, you pull data you need, rather than having to visit the sites to see if content has changed.

I used to go out and check 4-5 pundits websites (Joel On Software, DaveNet, SkippingDotNet, and a few others) oh, once a week. I’d visit the sites to see if they’d put up any new articles, which I’d then read. Now, however, I rolled my own RSS aggregator, which outputs a nice listing of changes to some of those websites. It is nice to be informed of new postings, but the downside is that I hardly visit the sites that don’t provide RSS feeds.

I was chatting with some friends after seeing an author speak at a book signing at the Boulder Book Store (Neal Stephenson, promoting Quick Silver. It has pirates!). I was complaining because I am sure there are plenty of free and low cost events out there that I miss because I’m not aware of them. I thought it would be great to have a web site that aggregated all those events for a particular locality into one page that I could visit. ‘Hey, it’s Friday and the CU astronomy department is letting folks look through their telescopes!’ This would be a huge undertaking, however, if one had to screen scrape the ‘New Events’ pages of each interesting organization. If, however, they all made their schedule available as RSS, it would be trivial.

The question is, what do the organizations gain? Increased visibility. If it’s a book signing, the purpose is to draw folks in so they buy books. If it’s a library event, then the more folks one draws, the more the library is being used. If it’s the Boulder Theater, then the more people come to an event, the more beer they can sell.

Think of it as a automated version of the “What’s Happening” section of your daily paper. Wouldn’t that be sweet!