Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

RSS is opt-in authenticated email with a cc: list of everyone on the Internet.

I agree that RSS will eat into the space of one-to-world emails, but wiring it to deal with a notion of "addressee" is not a problem to be shrugged off lightly.

I'm pretty much a blog newbie -- didn't start reading them until a few months ago when off work for illness. Almost immediately I asked myself why the place I work doesn't use blogs for most internal communication from the company to the employees instead of email. We've offices in more than 40 countries, with folks being added and deleted from the staff all the time. Instead of maintaining address lists, and who's supposed to get what communication, Wouldn't it be handier to have a blog and just send RSS feeds to notify people of communications that they could choose to read if they were applicable? No need to have individuals to file emails for later reading or archive emails they might need to refer to later -- the blog post or archive would always be available for reference. Access rules could get a bit elaborate, but no worse than all the mail lists that have to be maintained for different topics that go to different categories of staff.

Eventually, the content management virtues of blogs will be merged with the project team management capabilities. It's already beginning, with blogs able to have sections devoted to people with read rights, comment rights, or post/edit rights. What needs to be integrated is the project management tools that handle tasking and work flow. But shouldn't be a big deal.

I also expect that all the "broadcast" newsletters, whether commercial or info, will shift to RSS. The demographics they get from the newsletter sign-up could be had when the reader subscribes to the feed (a la the newspapers that require registration). The main reason for a newsletter broadcaster to retain the newsletter via email is to maintain a mailing list for pushing additional communications (e.g. "third-party" or "partner" ads and promos) rather than letting the reader opt-in for each communication by pulling it once notified of the feed. But given how email readers are increasingly blocking as spam virtually everything that's not from a previously identified source, query how valuable the ongoing newsletter format will be, other than for highly motivated readers that want to get lots of extra email promotions, etc. And if they're than motivated, they'd probably be active users of RSS feeds.

"Friends and family" email could also be conveniently replaced by blogs and avoid all the spam problems at the same time. Guess that was what the Washingtonienne was doing -- the Congressional intern who got fired for using her office computer to blog about her sex life. It was a lot more convenient for her friends to check out her blog than for her and her friends to maintain email address lists that would clear spamblockers.

The RSS feed has one major drawback (other than presenting the challenge of managing access), which is that unlike email it can't serve a "registered mail" function to ensure that people actually get the communication they've been sent (and provide documentation of receipt). So email isn't going to die out right away. But lots of communications currently relying on email should migrate to RSS quickly -- I'd bet on months, not years.

Just to clarify, the "access" problems I mentioned are the flip side of the "addessee" issue raised by J Grimmelmann. The big in-roads into email will be in intranets, where channeling feeds and accessing restricted areas of blogs will be integrated with the rest of the identity verification function for all IT and corporate data management. "Friends and family"-type communications are a sort of ad hoc intranet. Other groups that rely on email to or among members, such as professional organizations, can similarly establish the equivalent of ad hoc intranets.

I like RSS, but it's always bothered me that an auto-retrieved XML summary is treated as if it was "push" technology (the way email *really is push*) when RSS is actually frequent -- but hopefully small -- _pulls_, with the attendant lag and/or wasted bandwidth of the pull paradigm.

Nadezdha (and all interested),

Take a look at Tikiwiki, an open source content management system (http://tikiwiki.org). The package enables Wiki content to be created and displayed in a variety of what I call social interfaces, including forums, blogs, articles, Wiki pages, and HTML pages. Each of these social interfaces generates RSS output and can selectively accept RSS feeds. Permissions can be assigned by user, group, and/or object. What's more, there's a project management/workflow module that can be used to weave any or all of these social interfaces into information flows. Down sides: the project leadership is somewhat amorphous, developers are more interested in adding new features than fixing bugs, the underlying architecture could be improved, and considerable PHP/MySQL expertise is required to install and configure the package. However, a competent developer can use the package to quickly develop incredibly useful collaborative systems for extranets. Tiki can also be used for public sites. For an example with RSS feeds, see my department's home page, http://www.sts.virginia.edu.

Bryan Pfaffenberger
Univ. of Virginia

RSS cannot replace email. Not only is "random-write access" important, but the subtle nuances of a medium are extremely important. My take on Doc's note is here:

http://www.jal.org/blog/archive/000239.html

Credit where credit is due.
Doug Kaye was using this phrase what, maybe a year ago. I have no idea if he originated it or, more likely, heard it from one of his interviewees.

Close. RSS is an opt-in authenticated listserver.

I'd say it's important that RSS is *machine-readable* opt-in one-to-many
email.

But maybe that goes without saying, because whatever one person wants to
broadcast by automated means, everyone else will want to accept and
process by automated means.

An implementation of "RSS is opt-in authenticated Email" can be seen at IzyNews
http://izynews.com

IzyNews is a new way of receiving news and other RSS feeds in your eMail application. With IzyNews, you can subscribe to thousands of weblogs and professionally syndicated headlines feeds for delivery right into your eMail application.

IzyNews is made to work with a broad variety of popular eMail applications, such as
Outlook Express, Outlook, Pocket PC Inbox, Mozilla, Thunderbird, Eudora, Entourage, Mulberry and many others

Does anybody know of a tool which will monitor an RSS feed and when it updates send the updated feed to a mailing list?

Semper Gumby - Always flexible (United States Air Forces, Europe, Contracting squadron motto)

Animis opibusque parati - Prepared in minds and resources (ready for anything)

Ex nihilo nihil - Out of nothing, nothing comes / is made

Neutiquam erro - I am not lost