the end (of www) is nigh!!!

Last night, On the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Janeane Garafalo mentioned that Air America Radio (the new liberal talk radio) has links to what she termed "the blogosphere" to help connect those who share like-minded political viewpoints.

This is a big deal. I can't seem to talk to many people about RSS / Syndication / Blogs because they just don't understand the major paradigm shift that is coming to the Internet because of this. Microsoft knows, and there are now hundreds of MS employees blogging. The rumour is that LongHorn's Avalon SDK enables programmers to use RSS feeds *anywhere* on the desktop.

So what does this mean to the average joe? All of the web pages you visit will hopefully soon publish raw data that computer programs can read. Leveraging this, it could replace email.... just blog or write something on a LiveJournal, and all of your friends will instantly see it in their "news aggregator" which somewhat resembles email.

Its basically a inbox of all of the changes on the Internet (web pages, email, or really, anything can use this techology) since you last got on... all in one place, and you can browse it all in a manner of minutes.

Yahoo freaked out, so did Sun and Macromedia. These major companies (as well as MS as I mentioned) are simply freaking out. Why so bad? Well... Howard Dean leveraged blogs to raise the majority of his campaign funds. This technology connects people, and more importantly, syndicates of people. It links pages and content together so well, that it breaks Google.

Google's basic idea to their success is that if a lot of people link to a page, then that page must be an authority. Now, a heavily linked page could simply mean that it is part of a syndicate of bloggers, and other web pages. Google doesn't do too well tracing back to original post that started the chain... it only sees the whole chain all at once, without a starting point.

But don't worry about Google, they're proceeding on in pre-IPO corporate fashion, bought Blogger.com, and now have thier own ATOM format to compete with RSS... expect them to try to freak out in the most vocal way. (They just gave blogger.com members free Gmail accounts).

This could revolutionize even basic data transfer anywhere on the Internet.

So where is going? I don't know... but the more this catches on (most likely when MS makes this a big deal here in 2~3 years), then this will be a seriously new Internet. If you're having problems getting to the source of RSS and the revolution, just visit scripting.com.