Where's the RSS

BLOGGER -- The GooglePlex team have brushed off a revised look for Blogger but an important bit is missing--it does not support RSS 2.0 and that's a very significant shortcoming. I depend on RSS for my major stream of information, even more than I depend upon Google to find arcane information.

Cue Dave Winer:

It was disappointing that the new Blogger interface, which looks quite nice, doesn't support RSS 2.0. I'm far from the only one who's commenting. It would be so easy to do, so not evil, so grown-up, so much appreciated if they would just do it.

I teach multimedia degree students how to leverage the knowledge they find on the Internet. RSS is part of this knowledge management challenge. Google has to know this is and respond to consumer expectations. Are you listening, David Krane?

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Blogger -- start here
Dave Winer -- "Contact with Google"
John Robb -- "a new Blogger interface is out."
Phil Ringnalda -- "Breaking the world of Syndication"
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Comments

[peterb]

Do you really "depend on RSS," or on syndication? It sounds to me like this is more of a religious preference than a technical limitation.

It's kind of like saying you depend on "broadsheets" or "tabloid" format, when what you really mean is "I need a newspaper."

There are plenty of syndication formats; fortunately, there are also plenty of competent aggregators that support every format. As a consumer of syndication, you shouldn't care (and shouldn't have to care!) about what format those feeds are in: a decent aggregator will deal with whatever you throw at it.

If your aggregator doesn't support atom, then that's a _different_ problem, and one easily remedied.

[Bernie Goldbach]

Fair enough--I depend on syndication through a news aggregator and can pull it as RSS, RDF or Atom. However, I can't see why Google would want to walk away from RSS as it's well-established, performs like it says on the box, and delivers content as simple payloads for many large publications. Google wouldn't have to sacrifice much time to code for RSS. And if they accommodate RSS, they're helping hordes of established users. That's how I see it.

[eoin]

I am sure the writers of the aggregators would prefer that there was one format, and that it stuck.

I think RSS has major flaws, it should have a category tag, with a list of known pre-defined values, and some type of country signifier ( it does have a language tag, but that merely tells you the langauge - BBC Africa is in English but pertains to Africa)

Haven't examined Atom but I imagine it does not fix these easy problems and fixes a lot of hard ones instead.

An RSS 2.5 is needed, is all.

[mrG]

Anyone who says they don't depend on RSS simply doesn't read enough web information. One can only webwatch so many sites, do so many scroll-downs for whatever it was that was changed since the last visit, and once you get beyond, say, a dozen "favourite" sites, and especially if those sites tend to update sporadically, developing a tom-cat prowl list to visit them all is tedious to the extreme.

So I'm with Dave: Maybe not RSS-2.0 (Dave's pet flava) but some kind, any kind of syndication please -- most readers are intelligent enough to draw enough value from even good old mid-90's vintage 0.9 to make it a far sight better than no feed at all ...

unless, of course, you only want to be read by your mom and your dog.