Interesting reads from 10-plus years ago at theobvious.com

http://www.theobvious.com

Open Question: What would you do with RSS
http://www.theobvious.com/archive/2002/09/20.html

Stories and Tools
http://www.theobvious.com/archive/2002/04/15.html

A MetaFilter Proposal
http://www.theobvious.com/archive/2001/10/26.html

September 11, 2001
http://www.theobvious.com/archive/2001/09/11.html

The Next Usenet
http://www.theobvious.com/archive/2001/03/02.html

The way I see it, we already have about half of the solution implemented. First, there seems to be an almost endless supply of content creators. Webloggers, personal home page publishers, professional journalists, community participants are creating millions of words of new content. Second, we have the protocol: simple HTTP, and addressable URLs. Third, we have (at least the beginnings of) a common data format in RSS.

We're missing the other half, which consists of two elements -- a common semantic space (i.e. "categories of content"), and the client- and server-side tools to easily create and distribute content. The tools will come, and will come in multiple colors and flavors. Whether it's Blogger, or Radio Userland, or Microsoft Word, or EMACS, or a server-side tool provided by Geocities, there will be tools for reading, writing, commenting on, and publishing, RSS-based content (ed. note -- there you go again).

Imagine a series of webservers that exchange RSS feeds in a similar way. Since RSS 1.0 is extensible via XML namespaces, it would be easy to add one or more categorization elements to each and every item posted, in addition to a categorization for a whole channel. Additionally, RSS could be extended to describe types of publishers, so custom syndication servers could have their own rulesets to enable them to redistribute RSS feeds matching particular channels, created by particular publishers, or classes of publishers. Thus, theobvious could become a syndicator of RSS feeds of indie tech pundit types, while Google becomes the syndicator of record for everything it could get its hands on.

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