RSS in Two Directions

[Aaron Swartz <aswartz@swartzfam.com>]

It seems to me what we really want are two different formats. We want RSS,
which allows us to aggregate news stories from different websites. It's a
very useful format and is already being used by many websites. It was
designed to create a personalized portal page for people (My Netscape) and
that's what it's good at. While there are some features that would be nice
to add to RSS, it's out there and it works.

On the other hand, we want the scriptingNews format, which allows us to send
out real content -- not just links to news stories. This is why RSS always
does so bad in the RSS vs. scriptingNews comparisons: they're two different
formats, with two different goals! This format needs to be developed more
and recognized for what it's real use is. This is the format that keeps
track of actual story content, allowing users to do all sorts of cool
things. Because there's no HTML junk, this syndicated content can be sent
out by email, set up for display on a Palm, converted to a format to be
printed in the morning, etc.

However, we need to recognize that these are two different formats with two
different goals. There are some people who are perfectly comfortable
syndicating their content away and having it distributed on other people
sites. But there are also some who aren't quite hip to the syndicated
content revolution and would like to pull users back to their site and only
give away the URLs. Let's keep these separate, rather than make RSS an
monstrous one-size-fits-all format.

So what do you guys think? Am I making sense or am I totally off the wall?

-- 
        Aaron Swartz         |"This information is top security.
<http://swartzfam.com/aaron/>|     When you have read it, destroy yourself."
  <http://www.theinfo.org/>  |             - Marshall McLuhan