News and info junkies take new look at RSS - 达人(左手拿牌)

2004/12/14 | News and info junkies take new look at RSS
类别(技术) | 评论(0) | 阅读(13) | 发表于 09:49: Livewire: News and info junkies take new look at RSS
By Lisa Baertlein

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - News and information junkies are taking a new look at RSS, a technology that helps them feed their habit without getting overwhelmed in the clutter of the information age.

News organizations and Web log commentators constantly update hot stories, and RSS technology can help people stay abreast of the latest developments. But RSS is about more than the latest news. Some online shoppers use it to keep an eye out for rare items that come up for bid on eBay.

Users say the simple utility of RSS is its greatest strength. Popular demand, together with higher-capacity networks and a crop of RSS-related readers that make it easier to keep track of massive amounts of incoming information, have lately caught the eye of venture capitalists.

"What's old is what's new again," said Jim Pitkow, president and CEO of Moreover (http://w.moreover.com), an early RSS supporter that in 2000 snagged $21 million in venture funding.

But while use of RSS has exploded in popularity, it must work to overcome the stigma left by similar technology that in the early years of the Internet era created massive headaches for corporate network administrators.

NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK

Internet media company Yahoo Inc. has offered RSS feeds for two years on the news section of its site, and recently added RSS to My Yahoo in a bid to make it easier for individual users to pick the news they want to receive.

NewsGator (http://www.newsgator.com) has online and downloadable tools that help people select RSS feeds -- some free and others for a fee -- by entering search terms. Its premium content includes advice from Dear Abby and tech news from InfoWorld, as well as celebrity news and horoscopes.

In Austin, Texas, Pluck Corp. (http://pluck.com) has joined a handful of companies moving beyond news syndication and into delivering shopping notifications via RSS.

Pluck's downloadable tools can continuously search eBay and use RSS technology to notify buyers when the items they seek come up for auction. Pluck can also automatically search Google and Amazon.com.

Elsewhere, information distributors can republish feeds through FeedBurner (http://feedburner.com), a Chicago company that returns detailed usage statistics.

Technorati (http://technorati.com) users sign up for free Watchlists on a variety of subjects, which track postings on millions of Web logs. The San Francisco-based company also identifies hot topics on the Internet and measures the audience following of particular bloggers.

Rising RSS adoption among Web cognoscenti has prompted venture capitalists to make bets on some companies as the sector grapples with the question of how to make money.

Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mobius Venture Capital invested $6.5 million in Technorati, a venture industry source said. Mobius also funded NewsGator.

Pluck recently announced $8.5 million in follow-on venture capital funding from lead investor Mayfield and continuing investor Austin Ventures. FeedBurner this summer landed $1 million from Portage Venture Partners.

HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF?

RSS was created at Netscape in 1997. It has since been embraced by the New York Times Co., the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC), the Wall Street Journal and Reuters, among others.

But the roots of RSS go back beyond Netscape to a company called PointCast, once one of the Internet's brightest stars.

In 1996 through 1997, PointCast's system of delivering personalized headlines to computer users attracted some 1.5 million users and $48 million in backing from top venture firms. The company suddenly lost its market after network administrators blocked the service, complaining that its enthusiasts overloaded office networks.

And in a case of history repeating itself, technologists say RSS aficionados can still overwhelm networks with too many feeds. The addictive nature of RSS means that one user may sign up for hundreds of feeds. Multiply that times a few thousand users in an organization and network slowdowns or blockages result.

The rate of mainstream RSS adoption has been dampened by technical limitations that have required Internet users to have a some technical savvy to find and use RSS.

In response, browser software from Opera of Norway (http://www.opera.com) and Mozilla's Firefox (http://www.firefox.com), an open-source descendant of the Netscape browser, offer RSS readers that allow users to control which RSS headlines they see.

Despite the challenges, Moreover's Pitkow sees an upward slope for RSS.

"The Web has matured, and Internet users are more sophisticated now," he said. "They know what they want and what they don't want."; 0

http://august.5d.cn/

评论Comments