The RSS stock exchange

Things just got more transparent in Radiospace. Rankings were the motivation for this feature. But as I mentioned on OReillyNet, transparency as a constitutional value of Radiospace has lots of interesting ramifications. For example, direct one-click access to RSS sources -- a feature also available, in a different way, here on my own homepage -- is suddenly a lot more interesting. It used to be that RSS aggregators were few. Now they are many -- because every copy of Radio is one. The people running these aggregators can now start to trade channels as we used to trade links.

The benefits of this new RSS fluidity, which kicks things up a level of abstraction, seem obvious to me, and will seem obvious to anyone who finds their way here to read this. But those benefits will not be obvious to most people. Casual use of ordinary links is still not nearly as prevalent in routine business and personal communication as it ought to be. The kind of meta-linking possible with channel exchange will seem even more exotic. The challenge -- and opportunity -- is to make all this as easy and natural as most people think email is.


Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/03/03.html#a98