Interesting People mailing list archives
Time for the next (really) big Internet idea
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 20:21:31 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: Bob Adams <radams () ngiweb com> Date: July 7, 2005 2:36:27 PM EDT To: dave () farber net Subject: Re: [IP] Time for the next (really) big Internet idea --- David Farber <dave () farber net> wrote:
Begin forwarded message: From: Monty Solomon <monty () roscom com> Date: July 6, 2005 6:12:51 PM EDT To: undisclosed-recipient:; Subject: Time for the next (really) big Internet idea
The article now requires a $2.95 payment to view, but I found it via Google News. If you like, here's the full text: Time for the next (really) big Internet idea By Hiawatha Bray | July 4, 2005 Boston Globe If you still aren't paying any heed to the RSS revolution, perhaps this will get your attention: $100 million. That's the amount two Harvard guys plan to invest in new businesses that use RSS. It's a healthy chunk of cash for a technology that doesn't cost a cent. The software behind the World Wide Web is also free, yet Web-based companies like Google, eBay, and Amazon.com have made out all right. RSS might be the next billion-dollar Internet idea. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, a method for allowing Internet users to automatically obtain up-to-date information from their favorite sources. The concept was conceived in 1999, but unknown to most of us until 2004, the year of the weblog. The bloggers who hounded the presidential candidates and humbled Dan Rather used RSS to broadcast their words. Now, nearly every media company in the world is imitating them, with RSS ''feeds" sent from their websites to millions of subscribers. 2005 is shaping up as the year of the podcast and the vlog -- audio and video programming created by independent authors and posted on the Internet. Again, it's RSS time. A fan of Al Franken need never miss his radio show. He can use a bit of RSS-based software to check for each new episode and automatically download it for later listening. Consumers can enjoy the benefits of RSS without paying a dime. Software to let you subscribe to RSS website feeds can be downloaded free; one such program is built into the popular Firefox Internet browser. You can also get free podcasting and vlogging programs. The latest version of Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes software includes listings for about 20,000 podcasts. Click a button, and the iTunes music player locks onto the correct RSS feed and downloads the podcasts of your choice. All very well, but is there any money in it? A host of companies are already trying to find out. Indeed LLC of Stamford, Conn., is using RSS to shake up the online job search business. Instead of going to a single site like, say, Monster.com, to check job listings, you can visit indeed.com and see jobs listed on Monster, CareerBuilder, Hotjobs, and a number of other sites, as well as newspaper want ads. Chief executive Paul Forster says the Indeed site adds about 100,000 new listings each day. And the site uses RSS to keep users up to date. You enter a job title -- network engineer, for instance -- and Indeed generates an RSS feed for that particular job search. Add the feed to your RSS software, and you can have new job listings pop up on your computer screen. Caution: Don't try this one at work. There are lots more RSS-based business models coming together. Jim Moore and John Palfrey want to help finance them. Moore is a former senior fellow at the Berkman Center on Internet at Society at Harvard Law School; Palfrey is still at Berkman, serving as the center's executive director. With help from Ritchie Capital Management of Geneva, Ill., they have raised $20 million for their new venture, RSS Investors LP, and expect to bring in $80 million more. Moore and Palfrey are looking for companies that will not only apply RSS in innovative ways, but also clean up the technology's inevitable problems. Consider the double-edged matter of spam. Those mounds of digital junk in your inbox could serve as fertilizer for new RSS businesses. Say you're a company that wants to promote a special deal to customers who've asked to hear from you. Use e-mail, and your valuable message may be lost to an overzealous spam filter. Or you could hang an RSS feed on your website. It's the ultimate in opt-in marketing, since your customer must ask to receive the feed. And since it's not e-mail, your messages never get mistaken for spam. So companies that provide RSS-based marketing solutions are worth a look. But RSS has begun to develop its own spam problem. ''As much as a third of what goes out on the Web as RSS right now has the qualities of spam," Palfrey said. We've all seen ''Google spam." Pornographers, for example, put popular search terms like ''jennifer lopez" on their Web pages dozens of times, in order to push their pages nearer to the top of Google rankings. You can automate the process with RSS. With the aid of some complicated gimmicks, a blog with an RSS feed can be set to ping Internet search engines, thus making a spammer's website look much more popular than it really is. Since the search engines rank websites by popularity, this RSS gimmick can drive a mediocre site to the top of the heap. Palfrey predicts that this kind of RSS abuse will only worsen, and he expects to finance companies that will offer RSS spam solutions. There's also the problem of RSS overload. If a million people subscribe to a data feed from The Boston Globe, their constant hits on the site could overwhelm our servers. What's needed is a network of feed collectors that could spread the load over a larger number of computers, the way Akamai Technology in Cambridge smooths out spikes in Internet traffic for CNN and other big firms. Already a number of RSS ''ping" services like Weblogs.com have begun offering such services. Moore and Palfrey think there's room for more. After all, the age of RSS is just beginning. Don't doubt that it's for real: Microsoft Corp.'s next operating system, the oft-delayed Longhorn, will have RSS built in. The company is even adding a set of technical enhancements to RSS, and giving them the blueprints so anybody can use them. Why so generous? Microsoft is convinced that RSS is about to become a universal standard for sharing all kinds of data across all kinds of networks. Moore and Palfrey think so, too; they're betting $100 million on it. Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray () globe com. ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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