It would seem that RSS is the new Usenet in a lot of ways. That’s a pretty interesting thing. Brad Templeton posted an insightful analysis on interesting-people where he pointed out that usenet is (was?) like a town square – everyone can post anything to a common bulletin board. Of course, post and bulletin board have become loaded terms in the past 27 years, but the concept is basically there. This idea of a common space quickly leads to the idea of a tragedy of the commons.
What RSS buys us is the ability to start offloading costs onto the people doing the talking. Spamming via RSS simply makes no sense. Like, none at all. People will simply stop reading your feed, which is probably not what you want. It’s a really interesting way of doing one-to-many communication. Most readers nowadays want you to view each feed independently, however. What I want is one cohesive view – like a livejournal friends page. Individual views are nice, but I’ve probably read the old stuff. I want the new stuff at the top.
