Great news about RSSCloud from Dave Winer’s camp today. ReadWriteWeb: “All blogs on the WordPress.com platform and any WordPress.org blogs that opt-in will now make instant updates available to any RSS readers subscribed to a new feature called RSSCloud. There is currently only one RSS aggregator that supports RSSCloud, Dave Winer’s brand-new reader River2. That will probably change very soon.”
If you are an avid supporter of RSS, as I am, and perused the diatribes from tech news pundits stating “RSS is Dead” you probably found yourself struck with the sudden urge to chime in on the debate. Or perhaps do a bit of finger pointing following today’s news. But was this really a debate to begin with?
Twitter, the micro-messaging service, has become far more transcendent than we could have imagined a few years ago. Look no further than the activity on Twitter during the Iranian election which, along with coverage of other real-time news events, further legitimized Twitter as a real-time news delivery service. What’s more, the news is powered by people – bootstraps on the ground so to speak.
It seems almost overnight that Twitter went from pop culture phenomenon touted by the likes of @APlusK and @Oprah, to the streets of Tehran, and from IAmdiddy to the very real-time murder of Neda Agha-Soltan. We witnessed the outrage in Iran first hand, and in turn expressed our own outrage, empathy, and sorrow surrounding that awful event, in very real time, on an international scale.
During the days and weeks following the Iranian election, Twitter was the only place to get real-time news updates from Iran. 24 hour news organizations reported the news from Twitter. The Associated Press, Reuters, the New York Times and RSS simply could not keep pace with the flow of information reported on Twitter. There is no debating that point. And with that in mind, in defense of punditocracy, as Anil Dash so eloquently put it, the pundits were 100% right. RSS was dead. If you cared about real-time news, you weren’t looking to RSS as your primary method of delivery. Now all of that is about to change.
The actions of Wordpress today ensure that, in the very near future, the position those very pundits took will be tested to the happy tune of 7.5 million blogs. That assumes of course, they wont do an about face. After all, with the real-time web, our collective memory is rather short-lived.
Congrats to Dave Winer.
- Tease! Tease! Tease! [Dave Winer] 9.7.09
- RSS in the Clouds. [Wordpress News] 9.7.09
- WordPress Just Made Millions of Blogs Real-Time With RSSCloud. [Read Write Web] 9.7.09
- Say Cheese. [Tech Crunch] 9.5.09
- RSS Is Alive And Well [AVC] 9.4.09
- Oh, RSS Is Definitely Dead Now: Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo To Become Twitter COO. [Tech Crunch] 9.2.09
- RSS: A good idea at the time but there are better ways now. [ZDNET] 8.25.09
