I spent a little time today rereading some of the pages on the Atom wiki and elsewhere in an attempt to understand some issues that aren't spelled out clearly in the specification. I think maybe I understand now. Maybe. I guess I'll start this post with my conclusion: Atom needs a more complete spec, all...
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Yesterday, I brought up the question of how to go from talking about to marketing technologies like RSS and Atom to various kinds of people. It's easy enough to talk to a techie about it, but how do you convince your grandma that she should give a hoot about some newfangled computer whizbang thingy that...
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I read an interesting book last week called The Tipping Point. It's all about the little factors that cause trends to explode. It got me thinking about the growth of RSS and other data bite formats. By now, we're definitely past the Innovator stage, where RSS is only used by people on the bleeding edge....
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As I mentioned yesterday, there will be three types of challenges facing any effort to merge RSS and Atom: technical issues, goals, and personalities. Personality issues need no comment here.

Technical: a few technical questions that will need to be resolved include:

• Will the format have a namespace, or will it just have the...
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Dave Winer has made an offer to work with the Atom folks to create a single, unified standard drawing from both formats. Will the initiative succeed? I have my doubts.

There are three types of issues facing such a proposition: technical issues, goals, and personalities. I'll start off with an issue that relates to all...
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RSS may be the next big wave, but so far it seems only to have crashed down on the heads of those of us living in Tech Boom Bay. When we try to tell others about the revolution, we say shish-boom-bah, but they hear blah-blah-blah. Picking a colloquial term to describe RSS and other data...
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There's a lot of talk about RSS replacing email for various tasks such as online newsletters, so RSS is an email competitor, right? On the other hand, Aaron Schwartz posted today about an update to his rss2email script, which lets you subscribe to RSS feeds and have them delivered to you by email, and Lockergnome...
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From time to time, the issue arises of whether, and in what elements, data bite feeds should, or should be allowed to, contain HTML markup. There are a wide variety of opinions on the subject, ranging from those who feel feeds should be plain text with no markup, those who are okay with markup in...
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Finishing up a four-part series on data bite revenue models, today, we touch on the touchy topic of advertising.

Will we accept it? Hatred of advertising and the attitude that the internet is free (of cost) are deeply entrenched in net culture. Even non-intrusive advertising is despised by many. Intrusive advertising, such as spam and...
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Continuing my four-part series on revenue models for data bite formats, today I'll discuss factors likely to affect our acceptance or rejection of them.

Will we accept it? Advertising is probably the most controversial revenue-related issue facing data bite formats today. But of course, revenue is not all about advertising. Developers may sell their tools,...
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