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Thursday, September 29, 2005

Is the world really ready for blogs?

Did you say dogging or blogging? | Tech News on ZDNet

A survey of British taxi drivers, pub landlords and hairdressers--often seen as barometers of popular trends in the United Kingdom--found that nearly 90 percent had no idea what a podcast is and more than 70 percent had never heard of blogging.

Following my previous post about the Decline of Desktop I start to ponder if the current RSS model is really fit to become the future mainstream. As much as it was attractive to technology geeks at the beginning, the greatest misgiving of all maybe the lack of concrete standard for the feeds. The current de-facto should be RSS 2.0, yet there are older versions like 0.91, 0.92 and 1.0 feeds which are still valid; and there are atom feeds from Blogger, which in terms of architecture is quite different from the others.

Giants like Microsoft and Google are placing much effort in RSS. We are anticipating the RSS capabilities in IE7 and Windows Vista, the latest Google Blog Search finally include feeds in her index. Proprietary RSS standards may evolve that again impose risks that tear the whole idea apart. The parsing difference of HTML in IE and Firefox well implicates that client software may be the driver for the XML standard to evolve, which again, the giants eventually rule.