There's been some discussion flying around about how the rising popularity of RSS is slowly rendering design irrelevent. Michael Efford blogs about it. He noticed that his stats showed
more people were pulling his RSS feeds than visiting his site.
This really leads into an interesting discussion about where the value of RSS really lies. While an obvious benefit is the separation of information from presentation, it isn't the primary driver for RSS. I think RSS is catching on because:
Nevertheless, I think a lot can be done to enhance or "color" feeds so that this scanning capability isn't lost while allowing the style and flavor of the feed source to come through. We see this a bit in the ability to add a channel logo/graphic to your feed and the ability of some feed readers to pull favicons off of servers (e.g. FeedDemon and Bloglines).
Beyond aesthetics, I think more can be done to not only enhance the visual appeal of RSS feeds but to allow them to become even more useful. The RSS traits module is an attempt to enrich and enhance feeds so that clients can not only show more but do more as well.
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 27, 2005, 11:01AMIs it me, or is the race to index and provide searching for just about anything getting a bit out of hand?
A couple of days ago, Google revealed Google Video, a search engine for video clips, TV shows and the like. It pulls up clips from programs with descriptions associated with them. Beyond novelty, it seems pretty useless to me (except for a providing another source of ad revenue for Google).
Just yesterday, A9 (an Amazon.com experiment) released its new Yellow Pages with the ability to find businesses on a map and the ability to navigate up & down streets (with photos) near the vicinity of results. That's right. A9 hired some drivers to take pictures of every storefront in a bunch of major cities.
Beyond the brief "Holy Shit" moment, what the hell are we supposed to do with this? I know there's all sorts of theorizing flying around as to how we're going to index everything that moves, but there comes a point where the question of utility has to creep in. Do I really need to see a picture of the dry cleaning place near home?
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 26, 2005, 02:15PMSlashdot (the "Original Blog"TM) has a posting on ads in RSS feeds.
By way of Waxy's links (consistently one of the best link rolls on the Web):
Ben Goodger, lead engineer for the Mozilla Firefox effort, has been hired by Google. Let the big (and potentially dumb) conspiracy theories begin. Is a Google Browser on the way?
(Insert suspenseful, foreboding music here.)
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 25, 2005, 11:27PMBusiness 2.0 has a pretty good article on How To Become The Next Microsoft.
It's a pretty good read. It touches on how XML will become the language of the Internet. This is the stuff that, for me as an interface designer, gets me excited. I'm looking forward to the day when presentation is no longer mangled together with information. Instead, presentation layers are where they belong - on the client - with all the richness and interactivity that the Web has made us forget about.
This is an inevitable trend. It's less a matter of "if," than it is a matter of "when."
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 23, 2005, 07:37PMWired magazine has put Firefox (and one of its creators) on its cover.
On just about every level, Firefox is a superior browser to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. One can only wonder why Microsoft essentially abandoned IE development. Nevertheless, they're supposedly paying attention now. The IE has a blog that tracks progress of IE development. Too little to late? With Longhorn coming, does it really matter?
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 19, 2005, 11:36PMXml.com pits the two big guns of presentation languages, XSL & CSS, against one another. A good read (if you're into that sort of thing).
Apparently, RDF Site Summary and RSS 2.0 went off, got married and had kids: the RSS 1.1 Specification was just recently released.
It's an attempt to maintain the benefits of RDF without sacrificing the ease-of-use of RSS 2.0.
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 17, 2005, 01:14PMThose of you that regularly follow this blog know that every so often I get absolutely giddy when talking about RIA (Rich Internet Applications). I think (and hope) that it's the wavy the world is headed on the web.
Microsoft today announced that they're releasing Avalon, their Longhorn graphical user interface layer, as an installable module for existing operating systems. Avalon handles the rendering of XAML markup.
This may be partly a response to Macromedia's Flex presentation server. Flex renders MXML (Macromedia's own XML GUI language) into Flash applications that are sent over the Internet. Flex is actually starting to show some traction (at least according to the blokes at Macromedia).
You have to wonder how Microsoft can compete with Flash as an application delivery platform. Say what you will about Flash, it is ridiculously thin and truly adheres to the zero-install promise of RIA's.
Any way you flip it, competition in this space is only going to heat up. A good thing for everyone.
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 14, 2005, 02:27PMWhy the hell should we type what we want from Google when we can just give them a picture?
After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. A google search query is worth what...three or four?
An interview with Hartmut Neven, head of the Laboratory for Human-Machine Interfaces at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, tells all.
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 10, 2005, 03:37PMI've been a big fan of RSS for a pretty long time now. Though its been relegated to news syndication (mostly), I've always been intrigued with its ability to push content towards the user. That capabiilty is, in my opinion, what is so profoundly powerful about RSS. A user need not go snooping around various websites to see if anything's changed. Instead, the information meets them halfway (so to speak).
While this is great for keeping up with your favorite news sites and blogs, I think RSS can prove to be an immensely powerful platform for delivering data to richer applications. As it exists today, the typical feed is comprised of headlines, links and sometimes blurbs. It's effectively one-dimensional (that one dimenson is the channel).
RSS Traits is an RSS 2.0 module that attempts to introduce a simple way to enrich RSS feed elements so that consuming clients can, in effect, present a richer view of the arriving data beyond just a list of headlines.
The inspiration for RSS Traits came from some of the more creative uses of RSS that I noticed trickling onto the Internet. Ben Hammersly has done some great work that shows how you can creatively use RSS to get different types of data into a news feed.
From a product design perspective, I was intrigued by the simplicity of RSS but noticed that there was still something lacking once the client received that feed. Sure, if it's just a bunch of headlines, all a client has to do is display them. However, if the data coming in is more than just headlines and descriptions, it's hard to really gather the differentiating characteristics of each feed by just staring at the headlines.
Here's the Fark.com RSS Feed. Notice how each entry title has a category in brackets before the headline. Fark happens to have a handful of categories they use to categorize their headlines. Many of today's blogs have categories associated with them. Unfortunately, this isn't a very elegant way to tag each entry by category. More importantly, the client can't do much of anything with it.
RSS Traits allows you to add a lightweight taxonomy - right inside the RSS payload - that allows you establish any number of characteristics that can then be assigned to the entries within that feed. Feed readers and aggregators can then adjust their interfaces accordingly to accomodate the additional characteristics you've added to your feed.
RSS Traits is primarily driven by the notion that data can be more easily digested if it contains metadata around it that can then be distilled into visual cues. The RSS Traits specificaiton provides for the ability to associate colors and icons to particular entries (though this is not required).
The examples section of the RSS Traits specification illustrates some potentially useful implemmentations.
One final point: the goals of RSS traits can be achieved by simply creating a namespace and enriching RSS feeds in that manner. Nevertheless, drafting namespaces for some of the more basic uses is overkill. RSS Traits is a simple, and easily-understood alternative. Furthermore, because the taxonomies are inside the payload, consuming clients can effectively "morph" themselves to accomodate the information being delivered.
I'd be very interested in any feedback regarding this module. Feel free to comment here or email me.
Robert Cringely gets the old crystal ball out to give us his tech predictions for 2005.
The problem with Google's touchy-feely "we're here to make the world a better place" image is that, well, it doesn't exactly jive with being filthy, stinkin' rich.
I could just see the boys at Microsoft: "Welcome to the fold."
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 8, 2005, 10:11PMeMediaWire has an article up about the web design trends to look forward to in 2005. Some outfit in Phoenix called Forty Media came up with them. I'm not sure how they became the authority on design trends, but nevertheless, some interesting things to look out for.
Gizmodo points to some pics that look surprisingly authentic - revealing Apple's ihome(?).
What else can Apple throw an "i" in front of?
The lucky bastards at C|Net are like children in the proverbial candy store - brining the less fortunate tons of videos from the CES 2005 show in Vegas. Check them out. It's the next best thing.
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 7, 2005, 08:17AMBill Thompson rightly pleads for us to push the World Wide Web as we know it today right into the river. Amen to that.
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 6, 2005, 12:52PMYeh. You heard it right. Spyware's days are numbered because Microsoft released Antispyware.
This is really just Microsoft slapping their logo on a product they obtained through their acquisition of Giant.
Bill Gates rambles on and on about all kinds of stuff - Xbox, Apple and *cough* Firefox. Good reading.
It's official (I guess), Six Apart will be acquiring LiveJournal. Google bought Blogger way back when. I guess that about covers in terms of consolidation. Is anyone else still out there?
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 4, 2005, 11:56PMTaking a page from Google Suggest, here's a very slick (dare I say - sexy?) dictionary that spits back definitions as you type. Very nice.
Posted by Richard Ziade on January 3, 2005, 03:07PMI hope everyone's holidays and new year were happy and safe. It's been an odd last few weeks. The disaster in Asia really put things into perspective (celebrations and all).
Well 2005 is upon us and I think this is going to be a very interesting year in the Web. Microsoft and Google are poised to take the battle to the next level; blogging and RSS will probably continue to grow and expand; and I'm sure we'll be surprised by the new and exciting applications and interfaces to be released in the year to come.
Basement.org will try to do its part.