Internet Watch: Interpreting the future of RSS news aggregation

rss| Internet

is the "content summary" an increasingly popular RSS phenomenon, a trivial technical standard, or can far-reaching impact on the future development of the Internet?

RSS is becoming popular on the internet, for this phenomenon, some people evaluation, RSS will be an important milestone in the development of the Internet, along with the popularization of RSS technology, the Internet will have a huge impact on the way information transmission; some people think that RSS is not a great technology, the impact on the Internet is very limited, It is not necessary to pay too much attention to RSS.

Then how to treat RSS, it is just a simple news aggregation standards, or the future of the Internet development trend?

The ins and outs of RSS

RSS was originally defined by Netscape by a set of news channel standards, because at that time Netscape in the competition with Microsoft's IE browser, only the release of RSS 0.9 version, and did not release the official version of the RSS, meanwhile, Microsoft has designed a feature called news channel in IE4.0, in which the concept of similar to RSS is the CDF (Channel Definition Format), and put forward the concept of pushing the Internet, the information will be "pushed" to the user, today we are in MSN The homepage also can see "My MSN" one, is this concept traces, but the push the internet did not find the right way to apply, ie later version of the end of the abandoned this function.

RSS apps began in the last two years of popular Web log (blog), Dave winner to make this standard again, he upgraded the RSS standard to version 0.91 and 0.92, RSS is the Web log author logger between the main way to pass news topics and content, With the growing popularity of Web log, RSS is also gradually recognized by many news websites.

The widespread use of RSS, the Voice of standardization is also increasing. The consortium has developed a RSS1.0 standard for RSS, which defines RSS as an RDF Site SUMMARY,RDF (Resource Description Framework) Resource Description Framework is a semantic web concept, but due to the fact that the consortium and Dave Winner did not agree on this, and in September 2002 Dave upgraded his rss0.9x to RSS2.0, so RSS1.0 and rss0.9x/rss2.0 are now relatively independent standards.

The above 3 paragraphs seem to explain the three different abbreviations of RSS English Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, RDF site Summary, although there are many differences over RSS, There are some uncertainties about the future development of RSS, but one thing is common, RSS goal is to become the common standard of Internet Information communication.

rss for Internet meaning

RSS tags are very small, is a very simple protocol, the technology is also very convenient, because of this, in some people's eyes, RSS is just a simple markup language, said he can profoundly affect the Internet is a bit of a fuss.

From the perspective of RSS's historical development, RSS is a standard of information communication, RSS through the form of XML technology to complete the automatic transmission of information between Internet sites, XML is an important basis for solving Internet machine communication, and HTML is suitable for people to read information mode, XML is suitable for machine reading information mode.

RSS as a site of information communication standards, there are two characteristics, one is the automatic completion of the site, do not need manual intervention, two is the content of the transfer is a classification of the index information. From the automatic completion of this view, will have an impact on the speed and breadth of Internet information transmission; From the point of view that RSS content is classified index information, it has semantic meaning, and the definition of Internet information will rise from pure text symbol to semantic connection level.

This shows that the seemingly very simple RSS technology is actually carrying the format of the Internet information, and give the internet semantics of the task. However, RSS is only an index information, and there is no complete solution to the problem of information communication.

The use of RSS

RSS was primarily used by Web log-class Web sites, and was the main way for Web log author logger to deliver news topics and content, and news sites were increasingly popular with RSS.

The analysis of the distribution of RSS in China can be roughly concluded as follows:

RSS is currently in the information source classes have more use of the site. For example: blog site, a lot of blog is published by the author of the original works, such as: blog China www.blogchina.com, China blog www.blogcn.com, news sites, news sites are news organizations of the Network window, with its own news sources. For example: Xinhua www.xinhua.com, the net (currently open the English version of the Russian version) www.people.com.cn.

RSS in the search engine class site as an aggregated news channel use, the application is more extensive. For example: Baidu news.baidu.com, Ancient dog news.google.com.

RSS has also been a large number of new sites as a force to push the focus of this edition-free news model, not only be seen as a new business of gold, but also real cost savings.

RSS client also has a number of companies in the push, Sina point through the reader, watching the world, Zhou Botong and so on.

Another concept associated with RSS is news customization, which allows you to customize the news page that you are interested in by using RSS feeds or news aggregation sites.

This looks interesting new news form, and did not get a wide range of users of the portal site to respond vigorously, currently only see Sina launched RSS, and promote the strength of RSS is not high-profile.

Overall, RSS is in the "mainstream" weak, "Non-mainstream" a state of excitement. The reason for current RSS current situation can be analyzed from two aspects, one is the business aspect, the other is the value chain aspect.

Analysis of RSS Business situation

As a source of information, the website provides the RSS way, can facilitate the customer to the content direct access, expands the content the influence; For the information receives the website, may receive many information conveniently, and can the real-time tracking, achieves the widespread, the seasonable goal.

Thus, as a new information exchange standard, RSS provides an automatic information communication method between any two sites in the Internet, which is of great significance for the website that needs to strengthen the information transmission.

However, RSS does not give the final answer to the information exchange.

Although RSS has changed the Internet can only pass the "symbol", content meaning only when the user can understand the situation, to achieve according to the content classification for the purpose of transmission, that is, can transmit semantics, but, because of the content of RSS provisions of the meaning of classification is very limited, People in the use of RSS classification (or channel) to identify information, often appear people want the information and get the information is not consistent with the situation, this shows that the semantic characteristics of RSS is not mature, RSS can not achieve the goal of good hosting semantics.

RSS semantic capacity is not enough, performance in the news aggregation there are two problems, one is from the news source news information, aggregated together to appear chaotic, not regulations, redundancy (similar information duplication) is very obvious; another problem, if you are customizing the news personality according to the RSS classification, The news you customize may be different from the news you want, the information you care about may be missing, or there's a lot of information you don't care about.

Many websites are reproduced information rather than original, seemingly, can use RSS news aggregation to enhance the real-time content integration and extensive, but due to the lack of RSS semantic load capacity, in the future for a long time, the identification of the content also need to rely on the editor, therefore, For portals that need to display an independent view of the Web site, it is not likely to take RSS for news aggregation.

RSS in improving the efficiency of information transmission will also bring negative effects, for some need to protect copyright information content, or do not want other sites to use automated means to quickly access the source of information, the effect of providing RSS is counterproductive, the adoption of RSS, very convenient for other sites to reference the content, This is not good news for a very popular portal, which may explain why the portal does not actively provide an RSS index out of the box, because RSS is for machines, and portal ads are most likely to be seen.

RSS Internet Value Chain analysis

The most important form of profit for the traditional portal site is advertising, including home ads, column page ads and content page ads, home page and column page is usually the title index page, access to the content basically need to go through the title index page, so here is the portal site advertising value of the core, especially the site home.

Through the analysis of the business situation of RSS, we can see the impact of RSS on the existing Internet value chain, RSS accelerates the transmission of information from the source to the receiving segment, which makes the value of the Internet in the intermediate link of the information transmission reduced.

For the portal, home Ads and column page ads bearer of the important benefits of the portal, if the full promotion of RSS, home page and column pages will certainly be a significant decline in the rate of return will be greatly affected.

In addition, RSS allows a large number of edit-free sites appear, edit-free site than the artificial site information update faster, while the quality of content is a long way from being an alternative editor, this is a bad news for those websites that rely on "copy" plus "paste", the rapid development of the old Dog news site in two years, It's a good illustration of the problem.

It is worth noting that RSS in the impact of traditional Internet value chain at the same time, and did not find a good market value for themselves, the old dog company news site has been in a loss, and other features of aggregation of news sites are less positive news.

Because the title index page is the focus of the title, and see the content of some paragraphs of the news content to see a few words can jump past different, the title is not necessarily related, netizens often can not casually ignore, look at the title index than to see content more need to focus, so, in these places advertising more easily disturbing.

Some RSS aggregator sites are looking for competitive advantage over traditional sites, to promote the concept of the so-called green News, the purpose is to use the RSS directly indexed titles, to exempt users from the pain of the index page ads harassment; The client's RSS reader, in addition to being able to get news from multiple sites at the same time, eliminates index page advertisements, is also an important advantage.

The question also comes, if the homepage and the column page does not put the advertisement, the content page because of the copyright relations, often needs the direct link, to RSS as the core news mode value point where exactly? RSS advocates are very confused. A possible way is to let the news users pay, push the so-called paid news, but in the free as the core of the Internet news dissemination, whether it is enough to attract users?

If only the ultimate user in the value chain can enjoy the benefits, the value chain change is a lack of long-term momentum.

The future of RSS

Today, the RSS craze has been swept, problems and opportunities have been placed on the desktop, in the changing position of the Internet companies are indeed more difficult, anyway, they should pay attention to and understand this change, need to change in the value chain to rediscover their own cheese, choose to retreat and wait and see, Although it can slow down the potential rapid evolution of the value chain that it has formed, but because in the value chain of the enterprise is not one of their own, competition in the environment, you do not have someone else to do, rather than let others do their own do, Sina's attitude may be the true portrayal of this situation, tepid, can enter to return.

RSS provides a concise standard for the definition of Internet information, and provides a direction for the broader definition of Internet information, RSS has far-reaching impact on the Internet, but due to the uncertainty of RSS, the impact of RSS on the internet will not be quickly released in the short term, RSS for the impact of the established Internet value chain, will also have a negative impact on the popularity of RSS, tomorrow's Internet, we not only have to positive RSS, but also to pay attention to RSS caused by the entire Internet format, semantics of the big trend.