RSS is one of the cylinders firing the juggernaut that is Web 2.0. For the uninitiated, RSS is the technology which allows you to take a feed of news from a given website and display it in another place, usually in an ‘aggregator’ which displays a number of feeds in the same place. RSS has always been intended for delivering pieces of information which belong in chronological order, like blog posts, twitters or the latest items on the Digg homepage. It does an exceptionally good job of that, ensuring that I always have the latest posts sitting in my Google Reader account, and that I don’t miss anything I don’t want to.

The problem is, not all data on the web that we might want to syndicate conforms to the template which RSS is designed for of chronological snippets of information. For example, RSS would be inadequate for delivering a music chart to me. In a music chart, it is not the chronology which determines the order, but the popularity of a given song. RSS is therefore not the right tool for the job, as when delivered via RSS the information would make little sense, with a series of songs appearing in my aggregator in a seemingly random order.

This wouldn’t matter if snippets of information in chronological order were the only things which it would be useful to syndicate. I think it would be quite nice to input a feed URL into Google Reader and be able to see, at any time, music charts. Or maybe the new Digg Top Ten list (look on the right sidebar), which isn’t based on the chronology of the stories but on the activity surrounding them. Maybe RSS isn’t the best format to syndicate conventional web search results in. I genuinely think it would be useful to be able to syndicate things like this, and this is currently not possible to any meaningful extent under the current situation where the only technologies around are RSS and Atom.

Before I continue, I think its probably a good idea to say that I am by no means an expert in syndication technologies (and neither am I a developer of any quality), and so if I’ve made a technical mistake feel free to set me straight. Nevertheless, I’m going to get ideas above my station, and tentatively suggest what the answer might be.

It would seem impractical to have a multitude of new syndication standards, with one for charts, one for web searches and to have to develop a new standard everytime someone thinks of a different type of information they would like to push around. Instead, a standard XML document could be used, with a common set of tags such as <title> and <description>, and the ability to invent new ones (as one can currently with the RSS namespace idea). What would be new is that instructions on how the information contained in the tags should be used should be contained within the XML document itself, obviously in a machine readable format. This would be far more flexible, and enable all sorts of uses that I haven’t thought of.

This is just an idea that I’m putting out there; perhaps its not possible, or maybe it isn’t necessary. Someone might have even done it already. It just seems to me like a logical next step if we want to make what is already an incredibly useful idea even more useful. Thoughts?

ComputerWorld is running a story about the future of laptops. Apparently, both Apple and LG are planning to release laptops using flash memory devices instead of hard drives.

Flash memory is already in heavy usage in a lot of consumer electronics devices, like digital cameras, MP3 players, mobile phones and similar devices but until relatively recently they have had much smaller capacity than hard drives and so haven’t been used for computers.

Dropping prices and increasing capacity are changing the game, however, and while we haven’t seen many high-profile companies releasing flash-based and hybrid flash and hard drive portable computers.

Call me sceptical, but I don’t think this is quite ready to happen yet, and I see one major issue here.

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As promised yesterday, I want to take a look at Twitter, a fairly new web application from Evan William’s Obvious company (who also developed podcasting directory Odeo).

The essential concept of Twitter has been called ‘nano blogging’; it allows you to answer the question ‘what are you doing’ in 140 characters or less and recieve updates on how your friends answered that question via the web interface, instant messenger (IM) or your phone. It acts as a constant status message, and unashamedly advocates the ‘what I had for breakfast this morning’ style of blogging, which is so vehemently shunned by the tech blogosphere normally.

When Twitter first emerged some months ago, I dismissed it out of hand as a stupid idea which would never get traction. I doubted that anyone would choose to use an inferior blog interface to publish updates of incredibly restricted length, making use of a basic friends system, when depending on their needs they already had the choice of anything from their own installation of WordPress, to Vox, to Facebook and MySpace.

I was obviously proved wrong. What I failed to take into account were two factors. Firstly, the ease at which one can recieve updates. If I chose to, I could have Twitter updates follow me everywhere I go, and every time one of my friends posts an update, I have a reminder to use the service. So all I need is one friend on Twitter who is posting regularly, and I have an incentive to respond, either directly to their ‘tweet’ or by posting one of my own. I do not have to remember to visit the Twitter site every so often to check for updates – they come to me. It is surprisingly addictive.

Secondly, Twitter fills an important niche for many of the tech bloggers among whom it is so popular. Take Robert Scoble. He is a ‘web celeb’, whose blog is essential reading for many wanting to understand new media and Web 2.0. He posts many times a day, usually with his thoughts on a particular trend, person, blog or product, often with personal anecdotes to support his arguments. Through these glimpses into Scoble’s life, people have come to be very interested in what he is up to, but his blog does not exist to tell his readers what he had for breakfast this morning. That’s a good thing, because most of his blog readers really couldn’t care less, but there are many who could care, and for them Twitter provides this. In return, Scoble gets the ego trip of having 100s (about 700 at time of writing) of followers who do care what he had for breakfast. He must be doing something right!

Expect Twitter to carry on growing. Twitter will never reach beyond the tech crowd. I tried to explain what it was and why it was addictive to a non-techy friend only yesterday, to be met only by scorn. However, the ‘early adopter’ market will continue to grow, and so Twitter stands every chance of remaining healthy (at least in terms of user numbers) in the coming years.

IMified, an instant messenging bot which allows you to easily control various different third party web services through their APIs (see explainer post) has risen to popularity over the past couple of weeks.

It’s easy to see why – with IMified you can currently post to WordPress, Blogger, Livejournal, Moveable Type and Typepad blog, keep yourself organised with Remember the Milk, Google or 30boxes calendar and Backpack and collaborate with Basecamp. That’s on top of their own Todo, Reminder and Notes apps, all of which work very nicely.

The three services I’m making use of are IMified’s own Reminders and Todo list functions, as well as using it to post to my personal blog. At first I was a little sceptical as to whether it was a gimmick or a genuinely useful product, but I have actually found it the latter.

IMified represents one of the good things about Web 2.0 – open architecture. It would be brilliant if this could be expanded so that over my IM I can have notifications of new email, updates on selected feeds and maybe even TV listings.

I’m particularly keen to see IMified and Twitter integration. A post about Twitter, a ‘nano blogging’ service which allows you to answer the question ‘what are you doing?’ in 140 characters or less and recieve updates from your friends via IM, text message and web interface, is coming soon on Gizbuzz. Despite the fact that Twitter already uses IM, it would be nice to be able to use it from one bot which does everything.

Over time I would hope that more and more services would be added. At the moment, services must be added by the IMified team, and so perhaps they should look at developing an IMified API that would allow third party developers to integrate their systems into IMified without any help from IMified.

IMified is a service I’m really excited about, and I think it could do extremely well in time. On a sidenote, as far as I can tell, IMified is a side project for its developers and unfunded. I think it’s an excellent example of how far a good idea can come without needing to enter the private equity game.

Stock markets slipped across the world today, probably fuelled by a drop in China’s Stock Exchange. The Nasdaq (the NY technology SE) has slipped just as all the others have, raising the possible question of a Web 2.0 bubble burst, brought about by other economic factors. Since the question ‘is this a bubble?’ is asked (or answered) by someone just about everyday in the tech blogosphere, I thought this would be a good opportunity to take a look at what might happen from here, using some common-sense economics.

In order to work out if we will see a bubble, we need to take a guess at what this stock slip means for the rest of the economy; this is either a correction of stock prices which were becoming slightly over-optimistic, or it is a more sinister economic downturn.

In the first case, there will be little or no impact on Web 2.0, because private equity is over-funded at the moment anyway, and they want to spend that money. If other areas of the economy, such as advertising and consumer spending, are doing well, then there is no reason why web companies shouldn’t continue to succeed. Therefore venture capital will continue to be available, and companies will continue to succeed.

However, in the other option, there could be a significant impact. Crucially, if the advertising market is hit (which can be one of the first cuts companies make if they are short of cash) then monetisation for much of the Web 2.0 sector becomes much harder. Companies will also have less cash to make acquisitions. Therefore, in a situation when it is difficult for Web 2.0 companies to succeed, the good venture exits (such as that seen with YouTube and Skype) will not happen because a) the companies won’t be making any money, and will have little prospect of making money, and b) no-one will be able to afford them anyway. In this situation, we could see a ‘bubble burst’, although it will be far less dramatic than that seen in 2000.

We’ll have to watch over the coming weeks to see what happens; I’m fairly hopeful that this is just a recognition by the markets that they were getting a little too excited. Given that the economy is inevitably cyclical, it seems much healthier to have mini booms and mini busts with sustained net growth than enormously successful booms and devastating busts.

Google Finance is the best place to get stock prices for the US stock exchanges. Unfortunately they don’t display the FTSE (the UK index), so you have to use Yahoo Finance for that.

Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft are pushing out a new update via Windows Update to their controversial anti-piracy software, Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA).

WGA is a tool which runs on the user’s system and verifies whether Microsoft thinks the user is running and genuine, or pirated version of Windows. If it finds you’re not running what it thinks to be an illegally acquired version of Windows, it nags you via the system tray to do something about it (i.e. buy a licence). You also can’t install certain applications and updates without having successfully validated your Windows installation.

It sounds simple enough, but WGA has come under fire for privacy issues (it phones home to perform the validation) and because it kept producing a lot of false positives.

This update is supposed to reduce the number of false positives and apparently there’s a new category called ‘Not Sure’, which, as the name suggests, is the category you get put in if Microsoft have doubts about your copy’s authenticity.

While Microsoft has not responded to requests for comment, it’s quite obvious what is going on here: Microsoft has added “not sure” as a way of cutting down on the number of false positives associated with WGA. As many as one in five PCs were failing WGA checks, but this new setting should both reduce this and give Microsoft the chance to investigate further the kinds of things that are landing folks in the “not sure” category.

I think part of the problem here is that a lot of OEM copies of Windows, that is, copies bundled with and usually pre-installed on PCs, use one activation code for each batch of computers (or even a whole model). That meant that if that one key got leaked, many users would find themselves being told about their illegal copies.

Clearly, piracy is something that Microsoft have to address, but the way they are going about it in recent times has not made them many friends. This move looks to be them toning down the severity of WGA.

One thing strikes me though – how easy it would be for malware to emulate WGA’s notifications and perhaps extort sums of cash from unsuspecting users to ‘fix’ the problem. Or maybe that’s just me.

Have you been falsely marked as a pirate by WGA? What are Gizbuzz readers’ thoughts on the issue? Let us know in comments.

If you want a quicker way to search the Gizbuzz blog archives, and you’re using Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer 7, you’re in luck! I’ve just added an OpenSearch setup, so you can search Gizbuzz really quickly and easily from the built-in search box.

To add us, just go to any Gizbuzz page and click the down arrow on the search box and choose to add Gizbuzz.

You can remove it again by going to Manage Search Engines (in Firefox) on that same menu.

Enjoy!

I just became the owner of a brand new 13″ white MacBook and for the first time, I’ve been able to experience for myself many of the delights of Mac OS X.

Safari is Mac OS X’s default browser and it is a fine browser at that. According to Wikipedia, it has a market share now of around 4.7% in Q1 2007, and the general trend is increasing.

In this special Gizbuzz post, I thought I would take a look at Safari – where it is now and where it might go in the future.

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The BBC is reporting that Viacom, the network behind MTV and many other major brands, has announced availability of a YouTube-style embeddable player for clips from their shows which can be inserted into third party websites. This follows their demand to YouTube to remove 100,000 of their videos, and the availability of such a player from Comedy Central in late 2006. This is interesting because it marks a change in the way that large media companies are thinking about new media.

The first point is that they are prepared to, to some extent, lose control of their content, in that they are enabling it to be displayed anywhere on the web. Whilst that has clear advantages (because of the viral growth possible with videos displayed on blogs and social networking profiles etc), it is not something that companies like Viacom have been prepared to do before. I could easily set up a splog or exploit site using the Viacom videos as free content. For obvious reasons Viacom would not want to be associated with such a site.

The second interesting point is that they have decided to go it alone, leaving the much higher viewing figures possible by using YouTube on the table. There are a few advantages for them in this. Firstly they maintain more control than otherwise over their content. They get better metrics; they can count how many times their video has been viewed, where it has been embedded, what country the viewers were in and whether they watched the video to the end. They decide, rather than viewers, which clips are posted on the internet. Most importantly, however, is the change in advertising model. By going it alone, Viacom may get fewer views of its videos, but it does keep the whole amount from the advertising rather than being forced to share it with YouTube or a similar service.

Ultimately, if Viacom can make itself an online content destination, this will result in more money for them, which would make this a very sensible move indeed.

Steve Jobs has just posted an open letter to the world on the Apple website, talking about various issues surrounding DRM, addressing concerns about iTunes + iPod lock-in, and interestingly, saying that if they could, they would remove DRM from the iTunes Store.

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Apple are apparently feeling the heat from judgements in places like Norway, where the iTunes + iPod lock-in has been declared illegal by the Norwegian government. I think Apple see the threat here, that if one country takes out iTunes, other markets could follow suit and that could be disastrous for Apple. Therefore, if Apple manage to get rid of the DRM, then iTunes can no longer be a problem, as it won’t lock you into an iPod anymore (assuming they offer downloads in a standard format, like MP3).

Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

This sounds like very promsing news for anyone in the anti-DRM camp (like me), and it sounds quite convincing. Clearly, from some of the statistics Mr Jobs made clear in this letter, iTunes could be selling a lot more songs than it is at the moment (only 3% of all music on iPods is bought from iTS) and I guess this is where Apple’s real motive is.

Still, it’s very good news for anti-DRM folks, and it almost looks possible that in time and with some persuasion from other big players in this business, the recording industry will realise that the downfall of DRM is inevitable.