Chapter 2
The Read-Write Web
Technology that Makes We the Media Possible
I still remember the moment I saw a big piece of the future. It
was mid-1999, and Dave Winer, founder of UserLand Soft-
ware, had called to say there was something I had to see.
He showed me a web page. I don’t remember what the page
contained except for one button. It said, “Edit This Page”—and,
for me, nothing was ever the same again.
I clicked the button. Up popped a text box containing plain
text and a small amount of Hypertext Markup Language
(HTML), the code that tells a browser how to display a given
page. Inside the box I saw the words that had been on the page.
I made a small change, clicked another button that said, “Save
this page” and voila, the page was saved with the changes. The
software, still in prerelease mode, turned out to be one of the
earliest weblog, or blog, applications.
Winer’s company was a leader in a move that brought back
to life the promise, too long unmet, that Tim Berners-Lee,
inventor of the Web, had wanted from the start. Berners-Lee
envisioned a read/write Web. But what had emerged in the
1990s was an essentially read-only Web on which you needed
an account with an ISP (Internet service provider) to host your
web site, special tools, and/or HTML expertise to create a
decent site.
Writing on the Net wasn’t entirely new, of course. People
had done it for years in different contexts, such as email lists,
forums, and newsgroups. Wikis—sites on which anyone could
edit any page—also predated weblogs, but they hadn’t gained
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we the media
much traction outside a small user community, in part because
of the techie orientation to the software.
What Winer and the early blog pioneers had created was a
breakthrough. They said the Web needed to be writeable, not
just readable, and they were determined to make doing so dead
simple.
Thus, the read/write Web was truly born again. We could
all write, not just read, in ways never before possible. For the
first time in history, at least in the developed world, anyone
with a computer and Internet connection could own a press.
Just about anyone could make the news.
About a year and a half later, on November 8, 2000, I was
sitting at my desk at the University of Hong Kong where I teach
part-time each fall. It was Wednesday morning in Hong Kong,
Tuesday evening in the United States, and I was immersed in the
U.S. elections muddle that left Americans unsure for weeks who
their next president would be.
The U.S. television networks’ news programming was
unavailable in the university’s Journalism and Media Studies
Centre, and local media weren’t spending as much time on the
story as I, an American abroad, might have liked. So I made do
with the tools I had—and I realized something that seems
obvious only in retrospect.
I found a National Public Radio streaming-audio feed and
listened to it. Meanwhile, I was visiting various web sites such
as CNN and key newspapers such as the The New York Times
for national perspective and my own San Jose Mercury News
for California and hometown coverage. I watched as the map of
blue states and red states changed, and drilled in on articles
about individual state races.
I realized I was getting a better overall report than anyone
watching television, listening to the radio, or reading a news-
paper in the United States. It was more complete, more varied.
In effect, I’d rolled my own news.
It was a convergence of old and new media, but the newest
component was my own tinkering to create my own news
24
the read-write web
“product”—a compilation of the best material I could find. It
was a pale imitation of what we’ll be able to do as the tools
become more sophisticated, but it worked.
My main focus in this book is on what happens when
people at the edges participate in the news-gathering and dis-
semination processes. Of course, I have to remind myself that
most people will remain—and I dislike this word—consumers of
news.
Yet even if that’s all they do, they can do it better than at
any time in history because technology gives them more choices.
(This is one reason why significant numbers of Americans,
believing they weren’t getting a fair perspective from the U.S.
media, sought out international views during the 2004 Iraq War
and run-up to it.)35
The news is what we make of it, in more ways than one.
To understand the evolution of tomorrow’s news, we need to
understand the technologies that are making it possible. The
tools of tomorrow’s participatory journalism are evolving
quickly—so quickly that by the time this book is in print, new
ones will have arrived. This book’s accompanying web site
(http://wethemedia.oreilly.com) will catalogue new tools as they
become available. In this chapter, we’ll look more generically at
the fundamental technologies.
For people who simply want to be better informed, the
Internet itself is the key. We have access to a broader variety of
current information than ever before, and we can use it with
increasing sophistication.
For those who want to join the process, the Web is where
we merely start.
The tools of grassroots journalism run the gamut from the
simplest email list, in which everyone on the list receives copies
of all messages; to weblogs, journals written in reverse chrono-
logical order; to sophisticated content-management systems used
for publishing content to the Web; and to syndication tools that
25
we the media
allow anyone to subscribe to anyone else’s content. The tools
also include handheld devices such as camera-equipped mobile
phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). What they have
in common is a reliance on the contributions of individuals to a
larger whole, rising from the bottom up.
It boils down to this. In the past 150 years we’ve essentially
had two distinct means of communication: one-to-many (books,
newspapers, radio, and TV) and one-to-one (letters, telegraph,
and telephone).
The Internet, for the first time, gives us many-to-many and
few-to-few communications. This has vast implications for the
former audience and for the producers of news because the dif-
ferences between the two are becoming harder to distinguish.
That this could happen in media is no surprise, given the
relatively open nature of the tools, which could be used in ways
the designers didn’t anticipate. It’s always been this way in
media; every new medium has surprised its inventors in one way
or another.
At their heart, the technologies of tomorrow’s news are
fueling something emergent—a conversation in which the grass-
roots are absolutely essential. Steven Johnson, author of
Emergence36—a book about how rich, complex systems such as
ant colonies come to exist—explained it this way in a 2002
O’Reilly Network interview:37
Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than
the sum of its parts...And yet somehow out of all this interac-
tion some higher-level structure or intelligence appears, usu-
ally without any master planner calling the shots. These kinds
of systems tend to evolve from the ground up.
In no sphere is the whole more intelligent than the sum of
its parts than in digital networks, where the basic units are zeros
and ones—and where, as David Isenberg explained in his
pathbreaking 1997 paper, “Rise of the Stupid Network,”38 the
value soars when you move the intelligence to the edges and
away from the center. The Internet, in particular, is becoming
26
the read-write web
the environment in which the new tools function, an ecosystem
that is gaining strength from diversity. The Web, as it grew up
in the 1990s, was a powerful publishing system that journalists
of all kinds used to great effect, and still do. But the larger
toolkit is part of an expanding, thriving ecosystem.
Let’s look inside that toolkit.
mai l l i s t s an d f o r u m s
Before weblogs we had mail lists, and they have not become less
important. As noted in Chapter 1, Dave Farber’s “Interesting
People” mail list is a news source of enormous value to his
readers. It is far from alone.
Because I spend time in Asia every year, including a month
teaching in Hong Kong each fall, I was extremely interested in
the rise of SARS. I wrote several columns about it in early 2003.
Soon after one of the columns appeared, I received an email
from a Harvard University bioengineering instructor, Henry
Niman, who had created several mail lists. One called SARS Sci-
ence, he said, “targets medical and scientific information on the
epidemic. Members include molecular biologists and scientists
from around the world who are studying coronaviruses as well
as astroviruses and paramyxoviruses.” Many of the reporters
covering the outbreak also subscribed to this list. A second
mailing list was for sending news articles about the disease. I
joined both.
This sequence of writing about something and then hearing
from an expert in the field has been a common one for Net-
savvy journalists lately. But in a sense, journalists were late
finding out what nonjournalists had been doing for years.
At last count, there were thousands of mail lists, covering
just about every topic one can imagine. Mail lists differ from
blogs and standard web sites in at least three respects. First, they
serve a specific community, the subscribers, and the community
27
we the media
can make the list private. Second, they tend to be narrowly tar-
geted, such as the SARS list. Third, they are “pushed” to sub-
scribers’ email inboxes. Some are moderated; most are not. The
key thing about lists is that they tend to be populated by a com-
bination of experts in a given field or topic, and by avidly inter-
ested lay people. This can be a potent combination.
In 2000, Yahoo! bought eGroups, a primary vendor of mail
lists, renamed it Yahoo! Groups,39 and now hosts thousands of
lists. It’s trivially simple to create a mail list.
Most mail lists have a small readership, such as the “Blog-
rollers” group Winer created in 2003 where webloggers tip each
other about new postings they think might be especially note-
worthy for their peers. Some mail lists have enormous reader-
ships, such as Dave Farber’s “Interesting People” list.
Unlike mail lists, online forums, such as Usenet news-
groups, are open to all comers. Individual forums are hosted by
companies, user groups, activists, and just about any kind of
interest group one can name. Some are moderated, and many
are valuable for spotting trends and getting answers to specific
questions.
From a journalism perspective, mail lists and forums can
amplify the news. They can be an early warning. They can
simply be excellent background data. But their value should
never be underestimated.
we bl o gs
Many to many, few to few. The blog is the medium of both, and
all.
Weblogs and their ecosystem are expanding into the space
between email and the Web, and could well be a missing link in
the communications chain. To date, they’re the closest we’ve
come to realizing the original, read/write promise of the Web.
They were the first tool that made it easy—or at least easier—to
publish on the Web.
28
the read-write web
So what is a weblog, anyway? Generally speaking, it’s an
online journal comprised of links and postings in reverse chro-
nological order, meaning the most recent posting appears at the
top of the page. As Meg Hourihan, cofounder of Pyra Labs, the
blogging software company acquired by Google in February
2003, has noted, weblogs are “post-centric”—the posting is the
key unit—rather than “page-centric,” as with more traditional
web sites. Weblogs typically link to other web sites and blog
postings, and many allow readers to comment on the original
post, thereby allowing audience discussions.
Blogs run the gamut of topics and styles. One blog may be a
running commentary on current events in a specific arena.
Another may be a series of personal musings, or political
reporting and commentary, such as Joshua Micah Marshall’s
TalkingPointsMemo.com. A blog may be pointers to other
people’s work or products, such as Gizmodo, a site devoted to
the latest and greatest gadgets,40 or a constantly updated
“what’s new” by a domain expert, such as Glenn Fleishman’s
excellent Wi-Fi Networking News and commentary page.41
While some blogging software permits readers to post their own
comments, this feature has to be turned on by the blogger, and a
significant number of prominent bloggers have not enabled the
comment feature. At the other extreme, the Slashdot weblog,
featuring news about technology and tech policy, is essentially
written by its audience.
What the best individual blogs tend to have in common is
voice—they are clearly written by human beings with genuine
human passion.
Blogs are, as New York University’s Jay Rosen puts it, an
“extremely democratic form of journalism.” On his PressThink
blog,42 a site that has become essential for anyone looking at the
evolution of journalism, he offers 10 points to explain why.
Here are the first three:
1. The weblog comes out of the gift economy, whereas most
(not all) of today’s journalism comes out of the market
economy.
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we the media
2. Journalism had become the domain of professionals, and
amateurs were sometimes welcomed into it—as with the
op-ed page. Whereas the weblog is the domain of ama-
teurs and professionals are the ones being welcomed to it.
3. In journalism since the mid-nineteenth century, barriers
to entry have been high. With the weblog, barriers to
entry are low: a computer, a Net connection, and a soft-
ware program like Blogger or Movable Type gets you
there. Most of the capital costs required for the weblog to
“work” have been sunk into the Internet itself, the largest
machine in the world (with the possible exception of the
international phone system.)
The nature of journalistic authority is shifting, he told me.
In a “bottom-up, chaotic system like weblog world, certain
sites are important without anyone designating that,” Rosen
said. Moreover, when the people formerly called the audience
are now participants, “that’s a different kind of relationship.”
Businesses have joined the conversation because blogs fill a gap.
A few years into the commercial Internet, companies discovered
the value of email for marketing and customer support, not to
mention internal communication. Then came the plague of
spam, which threatens email as a tool for external contacts.
Most corporate web sites, meanwhile, are like most annual
reports: static, stiff, and turgid, with the most revealing informa-
tion hidden in footnotes—sometimes to disguise the truth, not
tell it—and led by a “Letter from the Chief Executive” (or vacu-
ous mission statement) that appears to have been written by a
committee of lawyers and marketing people.
To the extent that even a business blog can bring informa-
tion to the audience—internal or external—with more style than
we tend to see on business web sites, enterprises will benefit. But
what brings people back to personal weblogs is their individual-
ized perspective.
30
the read-write web
Personal blogs also tend to be part of running conversa-
tions. One blogger will point to another’s posting, perhaps to
agree but often to disagree or note another angle not found in
the original piece. Then the first blogger will respond, and other
bloggers may join the fray. As tools are developed to help
people follow those discussion threads across different sites, the
cross-fertilized conversations will spread both in numbers and
complexity even more quickly than they do today.
To date, blogs have been a medium mainly for individuals,
though group blogs are proving to be a smart medium in some
circumstances. The most popular individual bloggers draw tens
of thousands of visitors daily. It’s safe to say that several mil-
lion people have at least tried blogging. How many do it regu-
larly is unclear, but the best bet is several hundred thousand.
The addition of audio, video, animation, and other multi-
media to weblogs has been an obvious move. But it’s taken
some time for these mediums to become part of the blogging
toolkit. Bandwidth (or lack thereof) is the main reason. But as
networks improve, we can take for granted that what technolo-
gists call “rich media” formats will infiltrate. (I’ve added audio
and video to my own blog, with limited success.)
Blogging software has evolved a great deal from the first
products of Dave Winer, Evan Williams, and other pioneers to
the genre. The most popular, as of this writing, are Movable
Type from SixApart;43 Radio UserLand,44 Live Journal,45 and
Blogger,46 but a number of competitors such as 20six47 have
emerged.
wi ki
Can absolute editorial freedom result in anything but chaos?
Yes, when it’s in a Wiki.
Ward Cunningham, who invented Wikis, defines them in
many ways, calling them composition systems, discussion
31
we the media
mediums, repositories, mail systems, and chat rooms. “It’s a
tool for collaboration,” he writes. “In fact we don’t really know
what it is, but it’s a fun way of communicating.”48
“WhatIs.com” (an online information technology dictio-
nary) defines them this way: “A wiki (sometimes spelled
“Wiki”) is a server program that allows users to collaborate in
forming the content of a Web site. With a wiki, any user can
edit the site content, including other users’ contributions, using
a regular Web browser.”
The crucial element is that any user can edit any page. The
software keeps track of every change. Anyone can follow the
changes in detail. As Cunningham so aptly puts it, all Wikis are
works in progress.
The Wikipedia, a massive encyclopedia, is the biggest public
Wiki, but far from the only one. There are Wikis covering
travel, food, and a variety of other topics. You can find a Wiki
category page on Cunningham’s site.49 One of the best exam-
ples of a Wiki as a collaborative tool to create something useful
is the WikiTravel site,50 which brings together a variety of view-
points from around the world.
Wikis are going private, too. They’re increasingly used
behind corporate firewalls as planning and collaboration tools.
And entrepreneurs are even starting to form companies around
the technology, extending it for wider uses.
Wikis are making inroads on campuses as well. My colec-
turer at the University of Hong Kong set up a Wiki for our stu-
dents to use as a planning platform for the 2003 class project.
The project looked at a controversial proposal to fill in more of
the harbor for development. Students posted their outlines and
story proposals on the Wiki and used the site to flesh out the
ideas. Instructors could watch over their shoulders without
interfering except to offer guidance. The Wiki was perfect for
this task.
Their use in journalism, at least the traditional kind, is
almost nonexistent. But as Wikis become easier to use, they will
32
the read-write web
become a particularly well-suited tool to compile information
from disparate sources, collected by people in different physical
locations.
s ms
If weblogs are becoming the opinion pages and, sometimes, even
the newspages of the Net, short message services (SMS) are
becoming the headlines. For bulletins, there’s nothing better.
Think of SMS as instant messaging without being tethered
to a PC.51 SMS isn’t a product per se. It’s a service offered by
network providers that allows customers to send text messages
over their cell phones. About the only things that differ from
carrier to carrier are price and the kind of device a customer will
use.
SMS has been a staple of the information diet just about
everywhere where mobile phones have penetrated markets,
except in the United States. That is surely changing. Forward-
looking newspapers in the U.S., along with other kinds of infor-
mation providers, including companies that have time-sensitive
information (such as airlines), have begun offering an assort-
ment of SMS services. The San Diego Union-Tribune’s SignOn-
SanDiego.com, for example, offers SMS alerts on local news.
And I’ve signed up with United Airlines and American Airlines,
the carriers I use most frequently, to be notified if flights are
delayed.
Journalists can use SMS in any number of ways; again, this
is much more common outside the U.S. The first inkling among
journalists of China’s SARS epidemic came in an SMS from
sources inside the medical profession there. Was this signifi-
cantly different than simple phone calls in its fundamental
nature? Not really. But in a place where being overheard can
lead to big trouble, it’s much safer—as long as one’s messages
aren’t being intercepted—to simply send a quick SMS.
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we the media
Over time, perhaps the most important value of SMS will be
of the kind described by Howard Rheingold in his prescient
book Smart Mobs:52 a self-organizing information system in
which individuals and small groups tell each other important
news. Rheingold relates, among other examples, how citizens in
the Philippines used SMS to organize and overthrow a corrupt
government.53 On a more prosaic level, young people in coun-
tries with advanced wireless communications have used SMS for
social organization. We’re just at the beginning of this tech-
nology’s development. As networks and handsets improve, SMS
will give way to video messaging, with yet to be understood
implications.
Professional news people will need to be plugged into
tomorrow’s smart mobs, just as they must be plugged into today’s
informal organizations. This is already a natural state of affairs in
much of Europe and Asia, which lead the U.S. in the develop-
ment of wireless messaging; certainly it was for the Chinese jour-
nalist who received news of SARS via SMS. Technology moves so
quickly that before long it will also seem natural to the men and
women who enter professional journalism in America.
mo bi l e -co nn e c t e d c a m e r a s
Pictures are part of journalism, and most organizations employ
professional photographers. As cameras become just one more
thing we all carry everyday, everyone’s becoming a photogra-
pher. We haven’t begun to think through the societal implica-
tions of this fact, but the implications for journalism are serious.
Digital cameras are a staple of amateur photographers, and
well-financed professional journalists use high-end digital cam-
eras for their flexibility and the ability to transmit photos
quickly. Video is also going digital at a rapid pace. The size of
34
the read-write web
high-quality digital cameras, still and video, is decreasing along
with the cost. Connecting them to personal computers for image
and video editing is simpler than ever, too. As broadband
Internet access becomes more common, quick publishing
becomes simple.
Now combine cameras with true mobility, and the ability to
instantly send an image to someone else or to the Web. This is
the world camera-equipped mobile phones are creating. The
images from early models were low resolution and lacked pro-
fessional quality, but even a bad picture can be newsworthy,
and the quality of phone cameras is getting better at a rapid
pace. Once again, it’s vital to remember technology’s rapid pace
of innovation and improvement to understand just how soon it
will be when most phones aren’t just equipped with still cam-
eras, but video cameras. Tomorrow’s mobile phones will be able
to send information and images to individuals and groups, and
publish to web pages in close to real time.
Keep in mind that public photos and videos are not new.
The beating of Rodney King captured on videotape is a prece-
dent for what’s coming. Citizens have been capturing videos of
tornados and other natural disasters for years as well, and cable
television caters to voyeurs with a variety of shows featuring
citizen-captured police chases, embarrassing moments, and the
like. News organizations have increasingly resorted to using
hidden cameras—an ugly trend, in my view, because only in the
most extreme circumstances, such as when someone’s life is in
danger, should reporters even consider such subterfuges.
We are only beginning to understand the consequences of
this technological development. There will be gross invasions of
privacy. The barring of mobile phones with cameras from
health-club locker rooms is a testament to the improper ways
people have already used these devices.54 But faster networks
and nearly ubiquitous cameras in the hands of average people
means that big events—the ones that have some element that
35
we the media
can be captured on camera—will be seen, and captured, by sev-
eral or many people. Keeping secrets, moreover, will be more
difficult for businesses and governments. We’ll look at these
possibilities in the next chapter.
i nt e rne t “br o a d c a s t i n g ”
At one time, Internet Broadcasting was seen as the next big
thing, with individuals and groups spawning Internet radio and
news stations with the same ease they create weblogs and Wikis.
But the entertainment industry has all but killed the possibilities
of Internet radio, at least the kind with music, by persuading
copyright regulators in the U.S. to impose unaffordable royal-
ties on Net radio.
News radio via the Net is another matter entirely, and
there’s a big opportunity for people to create their own shows
featuring interviews, audio documentaries, and other formats in
which royalty-free content is the goal. Christopher Lydon, a
longtime professional journalist who has taken to blogging in a
big way, posted a series of superb interviews on his “The Blog-
ging of the President 2004”55 site.56 IT Conversations, a Net-
only program, has been posting interviews in various audio for-
mats along with transcripts.57
Web-based talk radio is another possibility, and it doesn’t
need to be expensive. Two staff members on Howard Dean’s
2004 presidential campaign created an Internet talk-radio pro-
gram by patching together some low-cost equipment. They
showed that anyone can do this, inexpensively and fairly easily.
Look for others to put all the pieces together in a coherent
package that anyone can use.
Internet video is a different matter. While the cost of pro-
ducing video news programming is dropping all the time, deliv-
ering it online is extremely expensive, because Internet service
providers charge for uploading bandwidth at rates amateurs
36
the read-write web
can’t afford. This is where peer-to-peer networking may come
into play.
p e e r-t o -p e e r
Remember Napster, the music file-sharing web site? It started a
revolution with its file-sharing model, also known as peer-to-
peer (P2P). If one person had a particular song on his com-
puter, his Napster software would (if he allowed it to) tell a cen-
tral computer at Napster that the song was available. Then
other people who wanted the same song would check the Nap-
ster database, find who had the music, and log directly onto the
computer of the person who was offering the song.
This system, while having some legitimate (and therefore
theoretically legal) uses, was also a haven for copyright infringe-
ment. The music industry sued, ultimately killing the company.
What the industry could not stop, however, was the idea, and
other technologists filled the gap with increasingly sophisticated
file-sharing systems, some of which will be difficult to stop
because they’ll have no central points of control.
There are a number of reasons why P2P is important for
tomorrow’s journalism. One of the most prosaic is cost, because
P2P solves a serious problem: the more successful your web site
becomes, the more it costs you to keep it going. Internet service
providers charge web site publishers in several ways, but one
way is based on how much traffic your site receives and the
bandwidth required to serve the text, images, audio, and video
to viewers. Even a modestly successful video can create a huge
bill for the site owner. This is a unique situation in media his-
tory because in the past, the more successful you were, the lower
your marginal costs.
P2P solves this by spreading popular material around the
network. With technologies such as BitTorrent, a free software
37
we the media
product, every downloader’s computer is also a content server.58
So the more popular you are, the less it costs, not the other way
around.
P2P is also valuable in a political sense. New P2P systems
under development will provide the closest thing to anonymity
that we’ve seen so far. Repressive governments want to keep
Internet content under control, but anonymity will make censor-
ship more difficult.
As we’ll discuss in Chapter 11, the entertainment media
barons of today utterly loathe P2P, at least the kind they can’t
control, largely because it can be a platform for copyright
infringement. I also believe they fear it because of its assistance
in democratizing media. Either way, they want to put a stop to
it. They must not be permitted to succeed, however, because in
the name of preventing copyright infringement, they are taking
away other rights—including our right to make what’s known
as “fair use” for quoting and personal backups—and they could
ultimately dampen or even wreck the possibility of grassroots
journalism talking hold.
t h e rs s re vol u t i o n
For people who want to “roll their own” news reports, nothing
may be more important for them to understand than a little
known technology that is beginning to transform the delivery of
Internet content. And they can thank the bloggers, in large part,
for its growing success.
Early in the development of blogging software, programmers
baked in a content-syndication format called RSS, which stands
for (among other things) Really Simple Syndication. This syndica-
tion capability allows readers of blogs and other kinds of sites to
have their computers and other devices automatically retrieve the
content they care about. It’s spawning a content revolution that is
only now beginning to be understood and appreciated. It could
38
the read-write web
well become the next mainstream method of distributing, col-
lecting, and receiving various kinds of information. If the Web is
a content warehouse, the blogging world is a conversation—and
RSS may be the best way to follow the conversation.
Imagine your own “Presidential Briefing”—with only the
topics you want, updated whenever you want, and with the
added ability to drill down for details. No need to go to your
browser and reload a bunch of sites. RSS does the heavy lifting.
So don’t think of RSS as just another technology abbrevia-
tion. “Think of it as a Rosetta Stone to tomorrow’s informa-
tion—or at least some of it,” said Chris Pirillo, founder of
LockerGnome, a provider of tech-oriented email newsletters.59
“RSS suddenly makes the Internet work the way it should.
Instead of you searching for everything, the Internet comes to
you on your terms.”
RSS, or a technology like it, is baked into almost every
weblog software product. Create a blog, and you’re creating
RSS. There is a critical mass of content just from bloggers. But
traditional news organizations and businesses are realizing its
value, too, and they’re creating RSS “feeds,” as the files are
called, of their own material.
If you want to see the RSS feed of my (or any other) weblog
or other RSS-enabled web site, you have to subscribe yourself. I
can’t force it on you. This is one reason why RSS is so impor-
tant: the user is in control.
The web site accompanying this book has links to a variety
of RSS-related software and how to use it. But let me offer an
example to demonstrate how simple it is to get it running. In my
own case, on a Macintosh computer, I downloaded and
installed NetNewsWire,60 a type of program known as a news-
reader or aggregator. NetNewsWire came with a large collec-
tion of RSS feeds to which I could subscribe with a couple of
mouse clicks. For several that weren’t included with the
software, subscribing was trickier. I had to find each site’s RSS
feed web address, copy it, and paste it into NetNewsWire’s sub-
scription chooser.
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we the media
Like other newsreaders, NetNewsWire has three “panes,”
much like most email programs. In the lefthand pane is a list of
sites I follow. I click on one of those site names, and the pane at
the top right of the screen shows the headlines from that site. I
click on a headline, and in the bottom-right pane I see a sum-
mary of the article or the entire piece, depending on what the
owner of the site has decided to provide. If I want to see the
original page or article, I need only double-click on the site
name or headline.
Because newsreaders pull together various feeds into one
screenful of information, they are incredible time savers. I can
pull the headlines and brief descriptions of postings from dozens
of blogs and other sites into a single application on my Mac. I
don’t need to go surfing all over the Web to keep an eye on
what all the people I’m interested in are writing. It comes to me.
The formatting and structure of an RSS feed tends to be
bare bones, making RSS a great way to make material available
on non-PC platforms such as smart phones and handheld orga-
nizers, as well as providing a way for web sites to syndicate con-
tent from one another. For example, I have an RSS reader on
my Treo 600, a combination phone and personal organizer. It
scoops up a bare minimum of material from the RSS feeds—just
the headlines and summaries—and provides a great service.
The extensibility of RSS creates some drawbacks. Many
weblogs expose only headlines and summaries to newsreaders,
requiring the user to click through to the source (the original
web site) to read the full text. The irony here is that the news-
reader actually undoes the idiosyncratic feel of many weblogs by
stripping them of visual elements such as layout or logos, as well
as eliminating the context produced by blogrolls (blog authors’
links to other weblogs) or the author’s biographical informa-
tion (and any advertising). The same drawback, or benefit,
exists with text versions of email newsletters.
Newsreaders also assign equal weight to everything they
display. So the headlines and text from Joe’s Weblog receive
roughly the same display treatment as material from, say, The
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the read-write web
New York Times. For some users, this will be entirely appro-
priate. But others will demand—and vendors will surely pro-
vide—more nuanced newsreading tools, with the ability to high-
light by topic, by writer, by metrics such as how many other
people subscribe to a particular blog (its popularity), or by other
parameters. The world is waiting for such creative approaches,
and RSS and related tools will make them possible. Nick Brad-
bury, who wrote the popular HomeSite HTML editor and site-
design tool, has taken the first steps in that direction with Feed-
Demon,61 a Windows RSS reader that creates a newspaper-like
view of RSS content; for better or worse, it controls display
details and takes layout flexibility away from the human reader.
As exciting as RSS has become in the personal weblog con-
text, its possibilities are much wider. Information from all kinds
of sources can and should be syndicated this way. The New
York Times makes some of its content available via RSS.
Microsoft, while slow to embrace weblogs, latched onto RSS
recently in a way that was useful and honored the spirit of the
community. The company is making available feeds of its
Microsoft Developers Network (MSDN) articles, so a pro-
grammer can subscribe to MSDN rather than hunting through
the Microsoft site. Similarly, Cisco Systems has begun making
some material available via RSS. Several sites provide lists and
descriptions of what’s available, including NewsIsFree62 and
Syndic8.63
maki ng s e ns e o f i t a l l
If tomorrow’s journalism is an infinitely complex conversation,
keeping track of it will require an assortment of new tools going
well beyond RSS that will allow us to search for and organize
what we discover. A few have already arrived in what can only be
called “Version 0.5”—what techies call beta form: promising and
useful to a degree, but not quite ready for the average user.
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we the media
One that shows the way is Feedster,64 a web-based applica-
tion that indexes RSS files. I’ve found it useful for keeping track
of what some bloggers are saying about my own work. Feedster
has been experimenting with aggregating and sorting through
discrete collections of RSS feeds to create what it calls “Feedpa-
pers,” which the site calls up-to-the-minute digests of RSS-based
news and blog commentary.
Another is Technorati,65 which mines information about the
weblog world. It was designed by San Francisco technologist
Dave Sifry to fill a personal need. “I had been running my own
blog for about a year, and referrer logs [information about site
visitors and the pages they viewed on the site] weren’t enough,”
he said. “I wanted to know what people were talking about, and
what they were saying about me, and about the people I cared
about.” So he wrote some code to crawl the blogs and find out.
The Feedsters and Technoratis, and projects like them, have
become a vital part of a larger ecosystem. But like mail lists,
blogs, Wikis, SMS, and the other tools of our journalistic future,
they are only tools. They must not be confused with journalism
itself. Certain values must remain: fairness, accuracy, and
thoroughness.
At the same time, services such as Feedster and Technorati
are helping us envision what amounts to a new architecture for
tomorrow’s news and information. They may enable “con-
sumers” of journalism to sort through the opinionated conversa-
tions and assemble something resembling reality, or maybe even
truth, if they are willing to seek out sources from a variety of
viewpoints. We’ll look at this architectural potential in more
detail in Chapter 8.
More intriguingly, we have to ponder a world where many
kinds of devices connect relatively seamlessly, and where social
and business networks can be formed in an ad hoc way. The
spreading of an item of news, or of something much larger, will
occur—much more so than today—without any help from mass
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the read-write web
media as we know it. The people who’ll understand this best are
probably just being born.
In the meantime, even the beginnings of this shift are
forcing all of us to adjust our assumptions and behavior. The
people who make news, as we’ll see next, are at the forefront of
this adjustment.
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