Interop Fantasy Bubble…
I saw the news last week, oh boy… the RSS army wants to fight some wars.
There were some rss-dogs standing there,
I only paused to stare…
But having read the book…
It didn’t turn me on.
Now here’s some news: Syndication is free. Syndication is easy. Interoperability in a semantic context is neither. Interop doesn’t have a whole hell of a lot to do with RSS unless you want it too. Bloggers are largely representative of the consumer market in the vanity publishing industry. Most of us aren’t worth a bucket of warm piss, content wise. That’s why we deserve RSS. Because it sucks, it’s free, and the cockroaches whose dreams are informed by the 17th century tulip industry have emerged from the rocks overturned by their fascist war in southwest asia to proclaim that a new market bubble is rising, like swamp gas in the ruined wetlands where your city has sited its sewage disposal plant.
One doesn’t want to sound too negative. There’s important work going on. In real life there are semantic web technologies under development to support cross-community bioinformatic data integration and professional collaboration. In the blogosphere we have Ookles. In the real world we have ongoing efforts to secure XML for RDF applications in the financial services industry. In the blogosphere we have Kaboodlers.
Disclosure and apologia: I have no clue what Ookles is or what Kaboodle does. Some of my best friends work with companies that are trying to rip off the Google karma phonologically. I particularly want to apologize to Scott and Betsy and anybody else who might take personally this little rant regarding RSS and a bucket of warm piss. Syndication is cool. RSS is an adequate syndication tool for free content with no security requirements, especially if the content really doesn’t have to get from here to there. Harvard University’s Berkman Center enjoys a "special" place in the tulip fields of the RSS world. In the real world, MIT, ERCIM, and Keio are doing special work too.
