May 02, 2003
Features make good bait for catching content
Re: Why Blogs Haven't Stormed the Business World
First, a correction, RSS does not tell a reader program where to find a blog. RSS is the headline format that many weblogs use. Those headlines can be picked up from the site by a reader program. A nitpick, to be sure, but if you want to actually /find/ RSS feeds you'd want to use a service like http://www.syndic8.com
As for your assertion that features won't help, you could think of it that way. Adding features CAN help, in several ways. Firstly, users like features. Things that make users LIKE using the software are good things. What those features end up doing is collecting /more/ information. That information can also be shared, conveniently enough using the community-based RSS-1.0 standard and it's use of RDF.
Here's the thing, we (the users) will only benefit if /more/ content comes online. Be it public or intranet content. Without a LOT of content it doesn't become possible to search for anything. And if that data isn't ever created, entered and shared there won't be anything to search for. And if the users don't /like/ the software they won't use it. Thus the content won't ever get put online.
So features are certainly a good idea. Now, half-baked and poorly implemented features are always a bad thing. And like any other software it certainly takes some effort to sift through the good and the bad.
It's certainly a nascent market but look at where it's focus lies, to the USER. The individual. Not soley as a wage-slave employee or mindless drone trapped by wretchedly difficult 'content/flow management systems'.
As for standards, this is an extremely subtle and quite complicated series of concepts. There are some amazingly bright people that have labored years on this as part of the semantic web concept. It's finally starting to become apparent that the academic theories they've been 'going on about' are actually worth implementing.
This is entirely dependent on people putting content online and applying some simple markup to it. It's not as trivial as just 'paste some text' but then again, neither was desktop publishing at it's outset.
Things evolve, this stuff will evolve because of massive amounts of content and user desire to sift through it. If this means we have to razzle-dazzle them with some fancy doodads and features, so be it. We need them to produce the content, we're lost without it.
