Lee Gomes: How the Next Big Thing In Technology Morphed Into a Really Big Thing

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "John F. McMullen" <observer () westnet com>
Date: October 5, 2004 2:23:25 AM EDT
To: johnmac's living room <johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com>
Cc: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Subject: Lee Gomes: How the Next Big Thing In Technology Morphed Into a 
Really Big Thing

From the Wall Street Journal -

Portals
How the Next Big Thing In Technology Morphed Into a Really Big Thing
by Lee Gomes

What is it about the future that leaves us unable to ever quite guess 
how it's going to turn out? The question comes up, this time, because 
of the recent, much discussed ascent of Web logs, or blogs. The 
blogging phenomenon illustrates how some very smart people ended up 
being both very right and very wrong about a future just beyond the 
horizon.

A year ago, blogs -- outside of the small circle of people who actually 
wrote and read them -- were regarded as the daily diaries of people 
with no real lives to chronicle in the first place. No more. Think, for 
instance, of how much has been written lately about the role of blogs 
in the presidential election campaign.

For historians of technical predictions, blogs are noteworthy because 
of what they reveal about the evolution of something called XML.

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. It's basically a format that 
two computers can use to exchange information.

Five or so years ago, XML was going to be technology's Next Big Thing. 
If you remember Microsoft's .Net initiative -- and you'll be forgiven 
if you don't, since the company hardly mentions it these days -- XML 
was the catalyst that would enable .Net, and with it, a new generation 
of remarkable Web services. True, no one ever gave any really good 
examples of what these services might be, but why quibble with the 
future?

While XML, in its first incarnation, didn't go away, it also didn't 
make for any sort of Internet revolution, or at least not one that 
anyone in the real world noticed.

Fast forward now to something called RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, 
which is a technology that bloggers use to, in a manner of speaking, 
broadcast their writing throughout the Internet. RSS, it turns out, is 
actually a kind of XML.

Because of blogging, RSS is very hot right now, and it's spreading 
quickly. Many newspapers, including this one, use RSS as an additional 
method of making their content available online. Last week, Yahoo gave 
RSS a big embrace: If something is available in RSS, you'll be able to 
put it on your My Yahoo page.

In other words, thanks to blogs, XML -- in the form of RSS -- has 
finally arrived. This real XML revolution, though, is nothing like the 
stolid, corporate, rather dull affair that was first predicted. (If you 
liked database algorithms, you'd have loved XML.) Instead, it has a 
grassroots, quirky, somewhat antiauthoritarian cast to it.

And note the irony of it being Yahoo, rather than the original XML 
evangelist, Microsoft, that is out in front with RSS readers -- though 
Microsoft says it will soon be adding similar abilities to its MSN 
site.

No doubt this new RSS revolution won't go according to plan, either. 
Five years ago, the late Netscape Communications helped invent RSS -- 
and as Yahoo is doing now, used it to allow people to have access to a 
whole new universe of content.

"It took three weeks before we started being surprised with what people 
were doing with it," recalls R.V. Guha, a Netscape engineer who helped 
develop RSS. One of the earliest adopters, he says, was the Mormon 
church, which used the system to keep in touch with its members.

One issue to watch with the current growth spurt of RSS is what it will 
do to traditional Web economics. For example, some political junkies 
with whom I have an acquaintance spend much of their time these days 
using a Web site called Bloglines to follow election-oriented blogs. 
Because of its felicitous use of RSS technology, Bloglines will often 
let you read all of the entries from some very popular blogs without 
leaving the Bloglines site -- in other words, without visiting each 
blog's Web pages individually.

That's incredibly convenient for me -- err, my friends -- but 
economically injurious for the blogs involved, since many of them 
support themselves with advertising.

What will happen when bloggers realize that RSS may lead to fewer 
eyeballs at their sites? They may become more parsimonious in their use 
of the technology, using it, for example, only for "teasers," such as 
headlines of items featured on their blogs, and forcing people to visit 
their sites in person to read a whole piece. (That's the tack taken by 
paid sites such as The Wall Street Journal Online's.) They might also 
figure out a way to include advertisements in RSS feeds. In effect, the 
popularity of RSS might conspire to make it less useful.

The other potential unintended consequence to watch for in the spread 
of RSS involves information overload. Most RSS boosters describe it as 
an antidote for too much data. But as much as I'm a fan of this stuff, 
I see it only making things worse. As e-mail proves, if it's easy for 
people to use computers to say something, they will. Do they have 
something to say? Who cares!

Send your comments to lee.gomes () wsj com,

Copyright  2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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                          John F. McMullen
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