RSS vs WWW 0
I am without an excellent English library here (let me loudly complain) but it forces me to be resourceful in other ways. The internet is so damn primitive in its present form. There is little citable information on-line. Lots of opinions and "fuzzy" academic stuff. But nothing compared to a decent English library reference section.
I am waiting for when the entire Library of Congress is on-line. I believe it was Al Gore who promoted a method of calculating computer storage "space" in terms of LOC–where 1 LOC is the equivalent of one entire Library of Congress collection. How many megabytes/gigabytes/terabytes is that again? Who cares. Giga means nothing; LOC, on the other hand, tells me a lot.
In the same vein, here is a <a href="http://www.dylangreene.com/blog.asp?blogID=363">top ten list of reasons why RSS is also primitive in its present form.</a> Excellent criticisms, in my opinion.
Bare-bones breakdown on the ones I like (check his page for more details/explanations).
1) RSS feeds do not have a history. When you get back from your vacation, you only get the most recent.
3) Reading RSS requires too much work. [not really, but the next point is good:]
How subscribing should work: In my RSS Reader I type "dylangreene.com" and I see a list of feeds that I can subscribe to. Each feed has a one-sentence description, and I can preview what I'm going to get by subscribing.
7) Many RSS Feeds show only an abridged version of the content.
8) Comments are not integrated with RSS feeds.
10) RSS is Insecure. Lets say a site wants to charge for access to their RSS feed. RSS has no standard way for inputing a User Name and Password.