BuzzMachine

Dave Winer suggests someone keep a calendar of industry events. I think that would be a great use for SSE, the two-way, collaborative RSS: I get a feed of conferences and add to it what I know for all to share.

I haven’t fully gotten my head around Ray Ozzie’s announcement of SSE, a two-way RSS that allows you to not only receive new data but send and sync new data. I’m delighted that he consulted Dave Winer in the process, by the way. Ozzie mentions SSE’s use in such applications as calendaring and contacts. But I wonder if there’s not something else here, something about making one-way feeds two-way, something about making RSS conversational.

I have to believe there are applications for news here: various correspondents share the latest news on a story, for example. Perhaps this is how we update disaster reports. Perhaps this is how first-responders do, too. Or perhaps this is how we can keep data bases of current inventory and prices of materials. Maybe it has an application in shared reviews. Or maybe I’m getting it wrong.

How do you think SSE could be useful to news?

: Crunchnotes says new companies will be built on the back of SSE.

: LATER: See good discussion in the comments.

: I wonder, also, whether this is one way to handle corrections.

How about this as a fundamental principle of content and conversation on the internet:

I have a right to know when what I create is read, heard, viewed, or used if I wish to know that.

That is my followup to the whine about RSS — and content — caching below.

If this simple principle were built into applications — not the internet, per se, but in how readers and viewers work — then caching and P2P, which both serve creators by reducing bandwidth demand, would not be issues. This also would help those who want to make use of advertising (though actually serving ads is a different matter).

I’d like to see this as a technical add-on to Creative Commons: Distribute my content freely, please, on the condition that you allow applications to report traffic back to me. And applications designers should build such reporting in. The creator is still free not to require this and the end user is still free not to consume those things that require ping-backs. But simple traffic reporting is at least common courtesy.

I’d like to see this work for RSS, HTML, audio, and video.

: ALSO: Scoble, Winer.

: LATER: Just want to emphasize that My Yahoo will provide the data. It is not now because something broke in an upgrade but two Yahoo folks have confirmed that they will continue to play nice, for which I am grateful.

: LATER STILL: Matt Cutts of Google says he will mention this to the guys at Google Reader and believes there’s no reason not to build it into a next version of that new product. Bravo again.

Hey, My Yahoo, Google Reader, Pluck, Newsgator Enterprise and other RSS readers: Hand over my numbers. You are taking my RSS feed and caching it to serve more efficiently, which would be fine if only you told me how many times you are doing that. But you’re not.

Brad Feld is much more polite than I am about this. He complains that My Yahoo just stopped reporting how many subscribers a feed gets there and Google Reader never did report and many others, including those I list above, don’t report subscribers, even though there is an easy and automated way to do that.

That’s theft. If you took a song and cached it and fed it out to lots of people these days without reporting back to the owner, you’d get sued or slapped in jail.

Well, all I ask that you do for caching my feed is to report back the number of subscribers. Not much to ask. And not doing that is tantamount to theft.

Why do I care? Because I have an ego. Because I want to see how much RSS I serve and learn about it. Because I want to see how efficient my advertising is. And just because. Damnit.

RSS is becoming a ever-more-important transport mechanism but without metrics, some will refuse to be transported by it. My Yahoo and Google Reader are making hay including RSS in their new products. They should practice good citizenship and share the data those feeds generate with their creators.

I can’t go to the Syndicate conference this time, because it’s in California, but if I were there, I’d wear a T-shirt and carry a picket sign to all the players listed here and in my Feedburner report:

FREE MY FEED SUBSCRIBERS. HAND OVER MY NUMBERS.

: LATER: I should add that I’m not against caching because it saves on my server load. But I do want to maintain a relationship with readers who subscribed to my blatherings and the barest way to do that is to get statistics. I also am not crazy about services changing feeds without my permission; some cut my full-text feed back to just headlines. Do newsstands refuse to tell you how many copies of your publication they sell? Do they cut out pages and give you only covers? No. Online distributors should operate by similar rules of the road.

: UPDATE: Jeremy Zawodny, of Yahoo, reports in the comments that the Yahoo counts will be back; it’s a bug to be fixed. Bravo. Now how about you, Google?

: LATER: See a followup post on a fundamental principle, above.

: LATER CONFIRMATION: I also just heard from a Yahoo exec who confirms that, indeed, something got broken in an upgrade and that they will feed back stats on feeds. Once again, thanks, Yahoo.

: LATER STILL: (Repeating this from the post above): Matt Cutts of Google says in the comments here that he will mention this to the guys at Google Reader and believes there’s no reason not to build it into a next version of that new product. Bravo again.

My beloved AP feeds are back. Jim Kennedy of the AP explains all in a comment here. If I were a real reporter, I would have emailed Jim to find out wazzup but I’m not, I’m just a lazy blogger, and I knew the answer would appear. And it did. Thanks, Jim.

Go here to subscribe.

I really did become addicted to the AP feeds. I sometimes call this “commodity news” but that is by no means a pejorative. It is the essential news. If the AP puts it in the top news feed, it’s top news. It’s the damned A list of news.

Of course, there’s buzzing today about GoogleNews’ RSS feeds of anything.

I’d gotten addicted to my RSS feed of AP headlines. Now it’s gone. I feared that would happen. This was a test so the AP could learn about RSS but I knew the control of the stories would pass back to the AP’s members, aka the newspapers. But I still want my feed of AP news. Who has the best?

: Rex is also distraught.

: Tip to publishers changing RSS feeds: Shutting it off is like locking your kids out and forgetting to tell them you moved. RSS is an addiction, which is a good thing. So if you move on, make sure to leave a note on your feed.