RSS and personalized starting pages

I dedicate this sub-chapter to the description of two important pieces of technology, changing the way online available information is consumed. These are: the RSS (Really Simple Syndication), and the personalized, information-aggregating starting pages.

5.3.1 The concept – and the mode of consumption

Approaching from the point of view of users, RSS is a technology that delivers the contents of websites to users without the users themselves having to visit the site.

How does this work in practice?

Users subscribe to the RSS-feed of a website, using a so-called RSS reader application.

This application might be a separate piece of desktop software, an integrated part of an e-mail client (such as MS Outlook), or part of a website. Through this established feed, the website publishes information every time it is updated. For example, as is customary with blogs or news sites, if a new article is published on a news site, its headline, lead or brief summary is sent out to the RSS-subscribers. The feeds are updated automatically, and users can, in their RSS reader, see all the updates from all the different sources in one place. Thereby they can in real time monitor the contents of all potentially interesting websites. And if a certain article looks interesting, the user can just click on the item in the RSS reader and immediately get transported to the website itself, where the whole article can be found. (Cf. TechEncyclopedia 2007.)

Using an RSS-reader makes browsing more convenient (users won’t have to visit their favorite websites just to find out that nothing changed on them) and faster (users are notified immediately of the updates). The flow of information is reversed: the user does not need to visit the website – because the website visits the user.

Personalized starting homepages help collecting and organizing RSS feeds, and also scores of other applications that users might find useful. Picking and mixing from the available applications and sources of information, users can create their personalized starting page. Information on what constitutes such a starting page is stored on a server of the service provider, which means in practice that the page can be accessed not only from one’s own computer, but from wherever there is an internet connection available.

Figure 5 shows an example of a personalized starting page, run by the service provider Netvibes, and collecting RSS feeds from The Guardian, The Independent, BBC, YLE, an additional application displaying a cartoon strip, and another one producing an instant weather report.

Such is a very convenient way of organizing information – one that at least creates the illusion what we are not lost in the sea of information online. When clicked on a news item, it can be read in its entirety within the personalized page itself, and it is also possible to get directly transferred to the website in question.

5.3.2 The content

The RSS technology can be used by any website that is not entirely static. Naturally, the use of RSS is more important for sites that produce quickly perishable information, such as news sites or blogs that deal in actualities.

As for the kinds of information that can be published on personalized starting pages, it is hard to provide an extensive list. Apart from conventional RSS feeds, an armada of

"widgets" or "mini-applications" are available: these can, for example, display the weather forecast or continuously updated photo galleries, show famous quotes or stock exchange indicators, play embedded videos, or entertain the user with crosswords, puzzles or some other mini-games.

5.3.3 The business model

Admittedly, there is little public information on the business models behind personalized starting pages. "The Netvibes business model is largely undisclosed, although clearly investors are satisfied that the company is more than cool technology"

Figure 5: Netvibes personalized starting page

(Maven 2007). In most cases, this business model differs from the popular advertising-powered model of the net: even Google’s personalized home page service iGoogle (http://www.igoogle.com) does not feature ads³⁵. Direct advertising cannot be found either on Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com), Microsoft’s Live.com (http://www.live.com) or on Netvibes (http://www.netvibes.com) – in fact, Netvibes explicitly states on its homepage that it features "no ads, no logos, no corporate control"

(2007). Instead, since these sites act as gateways to other contents, it is supposed that behind their operation stand affiliate programs: i.e. content providers share their revenues with the referring sites (Maven 2007). Content provision does not necessarily mean links through RSS: companies might also provide various applications (such as the price-comparison product finder of Kelkoo.com) that users can integrate into their homepage (Netvibes 2007a).

5.3.4 RSS and the media institution

RSS – and similar syndication methods such as Atom – and personalized starting pages are not business services in themselves; they are merely pieces of technology. Through their use, readers can pick and mix contents from all over the web, but these technologies do not belong to anyone: nobody profits directly from other people using them. The copyright of the RSS specification is owned by Harvard University, who published it in Creative Commons license, meaning that it is free for everyone to use, copy, distribute, transmit or adapt it, as long as credit is given to the licensor, and the modified version is published under the same copyright license as the original (Harvard 2003). That is to say, a website – say, an online outlet of a traditional newspaper – might decide to develop its own, improved, private version of RSS, but if it takes the RSS specification as a starting point, then this "new RSS" must be made public too. If it is a new specification from scratch, then it won’t be compatible with existing RSS readers, and therefore it will have to build up its user base from scratch, too.

So the best an existing site can do is to subscribe to the publicly available model of RSS – meaning that it would have to compete with everyone else who uses the same

35 …even though Google is an important publisher of contextual classified advertising (Economist 2007a). In the second quarter of 2007 alone, it produced $3.87 bn revenues, chiefly stemming from advertising (Google 2007b).

technology. The domination of this technology is, thanks to the publicity of the technology, impossible.

5.3.5 Summary

The syndication of news items and the collection of these syndicated news items onto personalized "news-aggregator pages" enables online contents to reach their consumers quickly, and they offer considerable freedom and convenience in filtering the contents available online. Since the technology of RSS (and, similarly, that of Atom³⁶) is freely and publicly available, their publicness opposes their domination by a minority interest group that would prefer excluding other sources from reaching audiences.

All the above, however, does not mean that these two technologies in question would contribute directly to reasoned debate or to the development of the political or cultural public sphere. They are merely tools for organizing and spreading (quickly) information that is available online.

36 Atom is a standard published by the Internet Engineering Task Force (http://www.ietf.org), a non-profit industry organization (IETF 2007).