mediajunk

Yahoo is toying with an RSS system on its site, which will allow it to display headlines from weblogs and news sites, customisable by the reader. RSS -- which stands for Rich Site Summary -- is a way of using XML to create a summary version of websites. The feature is particularly useful for news sites, weblogs, and other sites that are regularly updated. The site summary usually consists of a headline, author's name and opening sentence -- though individual site owners can decide how they wish to set up their summaries. Summaries can then be exported, or “syndicated”, to other websites as “feeds”. While I provide an RSS version of Mediajunk, I’m not convinced that RSS has many useful applications for the average web user. For example, I couldn’t be bothered going to a site such as bloglines (even though I like the way it displays Mediajunk’s feed) and choosing which site headlines to subscribe to. I’d have to go and read through all the blogs I’m not familiar with first, which sounds like hard work -- for a reward that isn't particularly enticing. For now, I’m happy to check in on blogs I’ve bookmarked from time to time, and to stumble upon others if and when I find them through Google, or they are mentioned in the various blogosphere filters (see bottom of right-side column). In fact, blogosphere filters are the best use of RSS I've yet encountered. If there is to be a new web trend involving RSS, it will probably come from the bottom up. Web trends tend to percolate from humble beginnings; it’s much harder to impose a new behaviour (like signing up to receive blog headlines) from the top town. Which is probably why Yahoo! is being non-committal on the subject…