State of the RSS report

The first in Feedburner's market reports, How feeds will change the way content is distributed, valued and consumed (shouldn't that be, How feeds are changing...?), will doubtless be reported everywhere, but I want it here because I plan of using the excellent diagram next time I run a workshop on RSS/Atom feeds:

I have reasonable hopes that this diagram may even challenge Scott Wilson's claim to the most popular diagram in educational technology, ever.

Cheers, Albert Delgado!

Comments

[Joe Schwoebel]

The diagram only represents what is happening from a "user" perspective rather than the "developer" perspective. Much is what is happening with syndication is beneath the application layer (what the users see) and is actually happening at the data layer (what users don't see).

RSS and ATOM represent the “consumer use” of XML, but the real power is perhaps “industrial use”, which translates into data transactions. The School Interoperability Framework (SIF) is one emerging adaptation, but “healthcare” is already well advanced with “transactions processing”.

The diagram cannot be represented as a 2-dimensional model. Almost everything that happens at the “user layer” follows what happens at the “data layer”. To be complete and representative of where things are going requires layers, much like the structure of network architecture.

Without the layering dimension, no such diagram can be complete, prognostic or representative of what is happening with the overall direction of syndication. For example, IPv6 adds two dimensions beyond IPv4, and we still don’t know what this will mean for users.

To explain this a bit further, the development phase of RSS is similar to what we had with black and white television. It is rapidly progressing toward implementation of “color” in a world in which we have HDTV.

If there is a way to represent the diagram as 3-dimensional (or n-dimensional) structure, it would make more sense. It will never be complete as a 2-dimensional model.

Regards,
Joe Schwoebel