Welcome back from the holidays everyone. I hope you all had a restful and enjoyable break and are ready to get back to work.

In the ten years since Real Simple Syndication (RSS) has been invented, it has been one of the most significant technologies that Rodney Dangerfield would say "got no respect." Providing the connective glue behind most social media, linking various Web sites for automatically posting content, being able to Webify various other protocols -- RSS is the tech that most of us now take for granted.

I am not a big fan of the best of the decade type of stories (especially as the decade isn't really yet over for another year). But as I was thinking about how far we have come in the past ten years, I thought I would take a moment of appreciation for RSS and all that it has done. It is one of those stories of unintended consequences. And what is ironic is how many of us use it every day without realizing it, or even knowing what it does to help better our online lives.

Back at the end of 1999, a few computer scientists at Netscape (talk about underappreciated companies, at least for those of us that weren't part of their stratospheric IPO), Apple and Microsoft put together the beginnings of the protocol. Aided and abetted by pundit and programmer Dave Winer, RSS began to show up in a variety of odd places, including early Web server software. The early days of RSS spawned a series of specialty software tools called RSS readers that enabled some of us to keep track of new content that was added to our favorite Web sites without having to cycle through them in our
browsers one by one. And that is where things stood for most of the time, until the blogosphere and the social Web took off.

Well, those RSS readers were probably the biggest pile of mostly unused software. A few geeks used them, but mostly they were oddities. I recall giving a presentation in 2007 at the New Communications Forum to explain RSS to public relations people, and some of the things that I mentioned then still apply to the technology, such as a way to quickly scan information, be the first on your cubicle block to find out something, and supplement email as a way to send information to a
lot of folks quickly. I will post these slides to Slideshare.net/davidstrom so you can take a look for yourself if you are interested.

Just as a side note: the site Slideshare.net is an interesting outgrowth of RSS itself: you can notify various people on your
LinkedIn and other sites when you put up new content such as this slide deck.

I still have my collection of RSS feeds somewhere on my hard drive, and I stopped looking at them a few years ago when I realized that I could Google just about anything that actually showed up in these feeds.

The early blogging tools had one big thing going for them: they automatically generated their RSS feeds without any additional software. This made it easy to integrate their content into a wide variety of places, and before you knew it, RSS feeds were an intrinsic part of online software.

Indeed, it became easier to just review my Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts and see what people have posted there than mess with RSS directly. So we can thank RSS first all for making the concept of a data feed popular in these social networking sites.  Now most everyone knows what "post to my Wall" means or "take a look at my feed" – terms that became popular from Facebook but owe their origins to how RSS was constructed.

Thanks to RSS, I can post my content to my Wordpress blog, and within a few minutes (or hours, depending on how things are going out on the Interwebs), that content will magically appear in my Twitter feed, my Facebook profile, on LinkedIn status, and more. I have tools such as Pixelpipe.com and TubeMogul.com that can send out content to dozens of different places. While with many of these tools there are other programming interfaces that are going on to enable all of this fun and
fascinating connectivity, it really got started with RSS and its series of very minimal standards to publish and subscribe its data
feeds.

So let's start off 2010 with thanks to those early RSS pioneers!

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David Strom, david@strom.com, 310 857-6867, St. Louis MO

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Since most of the TV shows are on what appears to be a three-month vacation, now might be a good time to seek Internet alternatives. I got the idea from a story last week in the New York Times about how one of its reporters has gone completely cold-turkey on their cable TV consumption.

It got me thinking about two guys that I know in their 20s that have taken completely different approaches to their digital entertainment consumption. Their approaches illustrate what we have to do to get our TV these days.

J. is single and a DirecTV subscriber, at $95 a month. C. is engaged but doesn’t pay for his TV programming. Like the NYT reporter, he uses his computer to send video to his TV from various Internet sources, using a HDMI to DVI cable. Both are relatively computer savvy guys. Both bought their TVs earlier this spring – this is C.’s first TV since his college days, and did so because he wanted to make it easier for him and his girl friend to watch shows both separately and together. J. has a second TV in his bedroom, and a bigger plasma display in his living room. Both guys have 10 MB cable connections for their Internet service.

C. watches a combination of shows from various Web video sites, such as Hulu and Boxee and some on air TV too. He works in the financial industry, where he has Bloomberg TV streaming to his desktop PC as part of his job. J. works in sales and has some downtime during the work day, where he also watches TV on his PC, but only those Web stations that aren’t blocked by his employer. SpikeTV is his favorite. C. likes the Netflix streaming option, J. hates it – “if I wanted to watch ten-year old movies, I would just find them for free online.”

J. is a big computer gamer and has an Xbox and connects other gaming consoles when his friends bring them by. “The Xbox was difficult to setup to find my digital media,” he told me, much worse the Playstation 3, which easily found and played the majority of his video files that he has downloaded to his PC. It is ironic that a Microsoft gaming console connecting to a Microsoft Windows PC is more difficult to configure than a Sony console connecting to a Windows PC. C. runs on a Mac.

Curiously, the two guys also differ on how they watch movies. J. hasn’t been in a movie theater since 1996, and is proud about that record. Instead, he has downloaded hundreds of movies illegally from a file sharing service, and makes copies of the videos for all of his friends. C. goes to the theaters once every two months but says that it can get expensive, especially at big-city ticket prices.

C. has about 30 GB of music on his PC, most of it illegally downloaded. His last CD was purchased from a store about nine years ago. J. bought his last CD in 1996., and also has several gigabytes of stolen music on his computer. “There is no point in downloading a clip from a legal site,” he told me. “In the time it would take me to listen to the commercial and the first 15 or so seconds, I can find the entire MP3 song online and have it on my hard drive.”

So what can we learn from these two guys? First, going completely free-TV isn’t easy. Some shows aren’t readily available on the Internet. For example, HGTV has exactly 12 shows on Hulu at the moment, which is a very poor sample. Yes, you can find some old shows (C.’s current fave is the vintage Adam 12 series), but your mileage may vary. Yes, they are adding shows all the time, and in some cases you can find the shows on the networks’ own Web sites. I watched a few episodes of FlashFoward on ABC.com, but I had to watch short commercials and click on a button to continue playing the show when the commercials were done.

Second, the system isn’t spousal friendly, at least not for my generation. When I checked to see about my wife’s favorite local TV station, they didn’t have any stream that I could watch from their Web site. HGTV’s Web site is also miserable, making finding a show more of an Easter Egg hunt, and I mean that not in any good way. I know free-TV isn’t ready for my wife yet. C.’s fiancée is happy with their free-TV setup, but it has taken her a while to get used to the arrangement.

Third, while the TV producers and networks are trying mightily to avoid another Napsterization of video, they have yet to succeed. They have experimented with copy protection and that seems to be on the wane, and now concentrated on streaming. Some episodes are available for sale on iTunes.

One thing that is clear is that broadcast networks “must-see TV” is so over. Both guys don’t watch much in the way of sports or news programming. Both watch shows on their schedule, not the networks’.

Finally, the number of add-on devices and gotchas is still mind numbing if you want to deal with the Internet channel. For ABC’s shows, you need to download a player and not use Safari. Netflix has the best and widest streaming support but you’ll need a computer, a supported Blu-Ray DVD player, Xbox or PS3, or their Roku device. Some current shows don’t show up for days or weeks online. Others only have excerpted clips.

Speaking of Roku, I bought mine a month ago and unlike J., am happy with the Netflix choice of those older movies, especially the ones that have been upconverted to HD status. There is little interruption in the video streams, even with a Wifi connection to my network. And Roku continues to add other services, such as Pandora roll-your-own music channels, to make it easier to get content to my living room.

We certainly have come far with free TV — it wasn’t all that long ago that we were using videotapes and buying DVDs, both things that seem so quaint now. Streaming video gets better and better as our Internet pipes improve.

But we still have a long way to go before the Internet can replace the cable DVR. Certainly, Hulu is worth taking a look at and seeing if you can find your favorites and queue them up to watch on your computer. And as Netbooks and used Mac Minis are around $300, there isn’t much friction in having one of them connected to one of your TV outputs. The big remaining issue is having to deal with the various software pieces to try to play the videos.

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We all know about outsourcing, the ability to farm out work to people, often overseas, that will work for less, and sometimes for a lot less. But a not-so-new trend is changing the way that outsourcing happens, called crowdsourcing.

The idea is to take a job and divide it into small enough pieces that someone can do it quickly in their spare time. Think about transcribing an audio recording. Or Photoshopping a series of photographs. The difference between regular outsourcing and crowdsourcing is that you don’t necessarily know your contractors, and they mostly are here in the good ole U S of A. Think of it as stimulus package for our troubled times, but based entirely on the private sector.

The idea isn’t all that new, but is catching on due to some important trends. First off, there is a critical mass of people who are willing to do the work, and probably more people are going to be interested because of high unemployment over the past year. Second, the Internet-based tools that are used to farm out jobs and track completions and manage the crowds is getting better all the time. Broadband penetration helps: now most people don’t do dial-up, which is great if you are going to be online for hours at a time working the crowd-based tasks. Finally, many crowds have developed a solid track record, so it is more compelling for project managers looking for workers.

As a result, crowdsourcing is big business. There are several dozen firms that help organize the crowds of people that offer up their services, and some of them are making millions of dollars a year in fees that they collect from being brokers between buyer and provider. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and eLance.com are two of the more well-known ones, and if you want to find out others I suggest you first listen to my podcast with my partner Paul Gillin and Brent Frei, the author of one of the first industry reports on crowdsourcing. You can find the links to his report and our podcast if you go to: http://MediaBlather.com/103.html

Frei runs a company that provides crowdsourcing, so it isn’t too difficult to see his self-interest. But the report opened my eyes to see the power and the promise behind the idea. For example, you can leverage your own billable time by farming out tedious tasks to someone else that would gladly do it for a lot less than your rates. Or compiling a list of vendors by doing online research of their Web sites. With a $10/hour intern, this project would have taken 12 hours or $120 to complete the task. By divvying it up among a crowd, Frei was able to get it done for about $18 total.

Now, I know what you are going to say. How can you ensure quality of the crowd-based researchers? What about the time and cost to manage them? There are ways to build in redundancy and have the results cross-checked, and with the right kind of project management, you can piece things apart in such a way that makes sense for your crowd.

Paul and I have been doing our MediaBlather podcasts for several years, and always on the lookout for someone interesting to interview, particularly on social media and new marketing tools. If you are interested in being on our show, let us know.

Tags: Mentor