Publishing

After two years of sitting on FeedBurner, Google is showing some interest in modernizing its RSS management property.

Google acquired FeedBurner back in 2007. Since then, they’ve been faulted by many publishers — including me — for tolerating poor system performance and failing to keep pace with the web’s demand for faster services (see “Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?“). As an experiment, I pulled this site off FeedBurner back in January, trying out self-hosting and FeedBlitz as an alternative. I was generally satisfied with both.

But now Google has decided to hope onboard the realtime web train, introducing a new protocol with the oddball name of Pubsubhubbub. It’s a new notification scheme that should make RSS much faster, and FeedBurner will support it. This effectively addresses publisher complaints regarding FeedBurner latency.

Even Dave Winer, the father of RSS, seems excited about Pubsubhubbub. So back to FeedBurner I go.

If you want to follow me via RSS, please check to see you’re subscribed to the correct URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChrisBaskinddotcom . Or you can just click here and start all fresh and new.

Thanks to Google for hearing us out — and taking action.

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Want a preview of how Mainstream Media will look in the coming years? Go stand in front of the mirror. The next Mainstream Media is you.

By you, I mean anyone who thinks, has the desire to be expressive, and has the ability to publish. Today, that can apply to just about everyone on the face of the planet.

A lot has been written over the past year about the decline of the Fourth Estate: the Press, the Mainstream Media. And things are certainly in a state of rapid change. Newspapers are putting their brightest writers on the streets as readership and advertising revenues collapse. With the exception of organs such as NPR, radio Journalism has been dead for years. Even television — the dominant news media of the last few decades — is thinning their newsrooms as they struggle to maintain profitability.

Where does this end, and where will we look for reliable news and information as traditional media spins down and begins to wobble?

Read the full article →

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