The Second Coming of Content and RSS Feeds

“Dave Winer recently pointed to a post by Adam Green, which explored similar territory. Adam thinks 2006 will be the year the Web explodes:

"The explosion I am talking about is the shifting of a website's content from internal to external. Instead of a website being a ‘place’ where data ‘is’ and other sites ‘point’ to, a website will be a source of data that is in many external databases, including Google. Why ‘go’ to a website when all of its content has already been absorbed and remixed into the collective datastream."

His post specifically referenced Google, but I think this trend is much larger than even Google. The thing which is going to tie all this together is of course feeds. Mainly RSS, but perhaps Atom's much-vaunted extensibility will come into play too.

This gets to the heart of the matter and I think Feedburner is onto something big here. Feedburner now views the item (e.g. a single post from your blog, or a specific search result in a topic feed) as ‘the atomic unit of measure in the feed’, which will in turn lead to Feedburner managing syndicated content ‘at a more atomic level by attaching 'threads' to the item.’ It reminded me of the Design for Data and ’content will be more important than its container’ themes I was big on at the end of last year and beginning of this (and which I will be re-focusing on now)….

If you think about it, focusing on the feed item is a profound change in how we think about RSS feeds. Up till this year, most of us thought of RSS feeds as a way to subscribe to single sources of content. But over 2005 it's become apparent that content is being remixed, mashed up and re-published across many sources - leading to heated ethical debates over content rights and confusion amongst publishers on how to 'monetize' (sorry I can't help but use that word) their content. Fred Wilson had a nice post on this theme recently, entitled The Future of Media (aka Please Take My RSS Feed).” [Read/Write Web]

Ask yourself if your library is ready for this type of shift, because overwhelmingly, the answer is no. Librarians just aren’t thinking like this yet, and we need to change this. It’s at the very core of the whole “Library 2.0” discussion, and this is why it’s so critical. If we keep our content locked up on our own websites and don’t get it out there for people to use as they want to use it, then our content will fall by the wayside.