Just yesterday me and a friend were talking about how the NY Times’ RSS feeds are a weak, hacked-together, last-minute solution… it only shows something like 6 articles at a time, and a very very small (one line) excerpt of the article. Why not include the entire article, and also advertisements, right in the feed? Anyway, that is a philisophical debate for another day.
But what’s funny is I just came accross this blog post from Dave Winer that suggests that the NY Times’ adoptation of RSS was what contributed to it becoming popular in the first place. Excerpt:
The event that made the difference, that in hindsight was the tipping point for RSS, was the adoption of the format by the New York Times in 2002. The publishing industry, unlike the tech industry, didn’t feel threatened, apparently, by a thriving standard, so after the Times went first, they all just followed, compatibly, without reinventing, without gratuitous incompatiblity, without excuses, they just did it.
He concludes:
But we don’t need the tech industry, and it’s about time their attitude reflected that. They didn’t bring us the web, that came from a researcher in academia. And they didn’t bring us RSS, that came from the publishing industry.
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