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July 14, 2004

Yesterday's RSS Meetup

The third(?) installment of the biggest RSS meetup in the world took place yesterday. Here are the (unofficial) minutes.

The attendances: Robin Millette, Marting Lessard, Sylvain Carle, (Linux-User-Group-Guy-Of-Which-I-Have-Forgotten-The-Name-And-Need-A-Little-Reminder) Jean-Pierre Lessard and me.

Syndication or notification?

Martin and Sylvain suggested switching from "RSS" to a technology-neutral "syndication" or "notification" term to refer to what is bringing us together at this meetup. I think we concluded that this must necessarily cleared up ASAP in the upcoming meetups, or through the mailing list (see below).

Subverting the content producers

As you probably know by now, I have a profound inability to work in an environment lacking some kind of direction (read focus). So, I asked if this meetup would eventually lead to some real-world action. Sylvain suggested (and we all strongly supported) that we try to have as much open, free, syndication feeds from Québec's journalistic world, something that is badly missing. We also tried to identify the cause of the syndication gap we observe with the rest of Canada and with the US. Our couch-surfing, passive-pulling and star academy mentality was the most popular contender for the reason for this handicap.

Syndication and Semantic Web Toolbox Looking for Implementers

Being the dictator that I am, I tried to plug my urgent need to actually write some useful software that will serve the meetup's activist objectives. I shared my idea that out-of-the-box, FOSS software is the best way to accelerate the adoption of syndication and open content.

Open Content Producers' Source Of Revenue

We started to talk about how open, free content producers (reporters, for example) could make money out of their syndication feeds. Martin and Sylvain suggested embedded advertising, but I disagreed, supporting, instead, the idea that we collectively need to come back to intellectual, cultural and artistic patronage that was the de facto retribution mechanism, before intellectual property was invented.

My name is Web, Semantic Web

At one point I asked the reason why there was a RSS meetup separate from the Semantic Web Meetup. Two reasons where given : 1) Notification and syndication really is about the particular aspects of the semantic web that deals with open content, personnal or targetted publishing, blogs, and customizable content aggregation 2) the Semantic Web brand is unpleasing to the ear of a majority of people. As for the latter, I suggested that we should stop using the "Semantic" prefix : the Web is the Semantic Web, and the Semantic Web is the web. There is a W3QC meeting next web week on the subject and I'll try to attract some attention to the need to work on the Semantic Web's image problem.

New mailing list

At Sylvain's request, there is a new mailing list for Montréal's RSS, Atom, syndication and notification interest group. Ask Robin, the volonteer system admin, for how to subscribe. I mentionned that it would be a shame not to translate this into a pingable syndication aggregator ASAP. It was agreed that the traditionnal mailing list system is just a temporary necessity patch, which, to me, strongly supports the idea of an easily useable toolbox for doing just that.

Posted by Vincent-Olivier Arsenault at July 14, 2004 06:32 PM