Mike Coyle’s Weblog

Yes, I am referring to Rocketboom, which debuted on TiVo this week. It shows up on the “Now Playing” list just like any other show. Here, you have (relatively) low-budget video content showing up alongside mainstream TV programming as a first-class peer.

This is clearly a testament to RSS and its descendants (blogging, podcasting, whatever-we-end-up-calling-podcasts-with-video, etc.), and a sign of things to come for mainstream media in general.

If you have TiVo (and a broadband connection), here is more information on the Rocketboom Video Download Trial.

Really Simple Sharing.

In his post, Ray talks about the fact that many software packages don’t get the “mesh model” for data synchronization, and discusses the simple extensions to RSS that he and his team have put together (and published under a Creative Commons license) to assist in cross-product synchronization.

I have three thoughts on this subject:

First, I wholeheartedly agree with his observations about the industry not being tooled up to embrace a mesh model of data ownership and management.

As an industry, we have simply not designed our calendaring and directory software and services for this “mesh model”. The websites, services and servers we build seem to all want to be the “owner” and “publisher”; it’s really inconsistent with the model that made email so successful, and the loosely-coupled nature of the web.

There are so many cases where a vendor’s monolithic product works great, so long as you operate within their box. Integration with external systems is either difficult or unsupported. I’ve always felt that this is somewhat akin to these all-inclusive resorts located on very impoverished Carribbean islands: Everything is wonderful so long as you stay on this side of the razorwire fence.

This should turn out to be a short-term problem. Every day, we’re becoming more and more of a “mashup” world, where new things are created by combining old things in new ways. The ability to integrate is, in kind, crawling its way to the top of the required feature list for new products.

Second, I really like the fact that they’ve published SSE as a minimalist spec. The Extreme Programming crowd would probably consider this “The simplest thing that could possibly work.” To quote the FAQ:

SSE defines the minimum extensions necessary to enable loosely cooperating applications to use RSS as the basis for item sharing-that is, the bidirectional, asynchronous replication of new and changed items among two or more cross-subscribed feeds.

Third, while SSE is far from being “Groove for Syndicated Data” from a feature/functionality perpective, it’s safe to say that Ray, Jack, and the other folks involved have all thought about the problems involved in masterless, deterministic synchronization. Specifically, the problems that SSE doesn’t address are omitted from the spec by design rather than by naivete.

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Burning Questions, The Official FeedBurner Weblog, is running a series of market reports. The first installment is titled Feed for Thought, subititled “How feeds will change the way content is distributed, valued, and consumed.”

They give a pretty nice summarization of the benefits of RSS for non-blog contexts:

Feeds provide three critical benefits to any digital media:

1. A notification mechanism for updates to a specific channel of content
2. The ability to subscribe to content, creating a persistent link between publisher and subscriber
3. A semi-structured version of the content

I do think that the 2007 version of their Venn diagram will show Line-of-Business applications as yet another first-class producer of RSS/Atom feeds.

We have baked RSS feed support into the core of ProjectPipe.com, not because was the pre-AJAX hot thing to do technically, but rather because we firmly believe that syndicating project data will eliminate an entire class of status reporting, report preparation, and much of the other mundane busywork activity that absolutely chokes the productivity (and sometimes the spirit) out of so many project teams.

At Botonomy, it is our mission to help small teams solve large problems. Small teams don’t have the bandwidth to blow cycles going person-to-person gathering raw data for status reports or one-off inquiries. We want to throw software at that problem, and make it easy for the person that needs project information to instantly and easily connect to a reliable source of up-to-the-minute data.

In a nutshell, we see a world where the TPS Report publishes itself.