Letters from my Radio

Really Stupid Syndication

RSS is hype, RSS is bad. why should i push that button and subscribe to something i never asked for. what is this whole geeky blogging thing about, i am a user who wants some information and has no time to sit in the Pyjama surfing the net all day. people like us think bloggers are people with personality problems and that the Web of the past was a better Web.

The optimists might say:

RSS is the future, adapt to it or die. RSS and with it Web 2.0 will replace the Internet as we know it, and include all other media in it. RSS will be some magic remedy for the info overflow, and of course, a democratic way of expressing yourself, and take the power away from the evil media moguls. RSS will be the foundation of an improved economy where attention replaces labour, and robots take care of the household.

The scientist joins in with a certain sense of urgency:

RSS is the very antithesis of the website. It is not a ‘home page’ for visitors to call at, but rather it provides a synopsis, or snapshot, of the current state of a website with simple titles and links. [...] Syndication and annotation are the order of the day and are beginning to herald a new immediacy in communications and information provision.

Meanwhile, in the relatively small area of old radio in a new media world, running a little website next to your station, why should you care? You opened up a mailinglist a few years ago, you installed a guest-book script, you even went with the community and gave it a web-discussion board (so they didn’t feel spammed by all the mail-debate) and finally you also gave them a stream, a simulcast of what goes over the airwaves.

It’s a content flow

Congratulations, you are most probably part of the avant garde. Since the mid 90ies the concentration of the radio market goes so fast, that there is hardly any station in the USA which does not take part in some kind of Syndication. Playing radio shows it receives via Satellite or from elsewhere. More of an economic decision then, the rise of RSS allows you today the same for your website, rebroadcast that newsfeed and let others rebroadcast yours. a synaptic network of open flows which tend to stablize towards an ever self-emerging mainstream. radio userland is not only a name and metaphor of one of the products of one of te inventors, but the model for the way RSS is working in a blogging world. the importance of RSS is the channel metaphor, which it borrowed from microsoft active channel. the importance is that the radio of today runs unattended, in the background, channel for channel, and that now users can have as many of them as they like.

Why RSS matters

Interoperability, disruptive technology?

• It is not for the end consumers, but for active users or power users, and people who run websites, people who are into publishing. what’s wrong about it might be only that you feel kind of urged to also become a publisher. There are many ways to participate and nobody forces you to run your own blog aka micro news agency.
• RSS is a way machines speak to machines without gigantic standardisation and big companies involved controlling that. technically, its a compromise between human and machine readablity. things become messy, when they grow to the size of an eco-operating system. RSS ‘broadcast‘ is a one-to-many summary of what a site has to offer which is run by a one-man-publishing house, everyone can become a radio receiver and transmitter of digital content, sending arround a table of content of what’s new at home. But soon RSS will quit the a rock-star career and enter the realm of office automation.
• By linking here and there across the net one stream of consciousness cuts another. RSS is not a document standard, it is a way of updating you about someone else thinking in form a daily reading list. RSS is a lazy way of thinking together, combining the anticipated couch potato of push media, with the social software of tomorrow. Of course most of it is noise to you, and that’s why it needs a lot of filtering and work, aka the global mind of the blogosphere for the advanced consumer.
• For the rest of the world, they can profit from the info-maniacs, power users who bath in dataflows, weazels, pioneers, dabblers, entrepreneurs, gamblers. they get overdosed every day, and eat and digest each others text streams, bloggers replaced hackers. the rest of the world can still read their minds, news sites, used search engines, supported by algorithms and self-recruited human robots. but wether you like it or not, RSS is already filling the bloodstream of news-sites, portals, the print industry. more and more documents contain parts which are machine readeable, so called microformats.

there is a radio playing on the radio

the main reason why RSS matters is its tendency to mutate, the history of RSS shows a number of inconsistencies based on human ego. Podcasting follows the dream of one standard based on a big ego and a lot of sense of self-marketing. Podcasting as a cultural format is recreating the historic era of the radio serials, it is mp3 plus rss, every week again. you get the headlines, your radio downloads the shows, you listen to it while you have time. radio is nothing fixed, it changes over time and took many forms already. podcasting grows exponentially, while the quality of chart radio falls constanly, they meet way back in the past as amateurism. what happens now, with the all the plumbing between the media types, redistribution, quoting, remixing, tagging? a culture becomes widely practised, where copyright needs to loosen up a bit. live and archive are just two different views of the same data. if it doesn’t get copied, what is worth for? sure this new digital messyness got big, and it will take more than 5 years to replace the CD with downloads. it took years until FM put AM aside.

vertical listening

normally you listen to one content channel per time, while radio listeners are too busy with other stuff to be able to zap very often. for radio and the record and radio industry the bad news of the ipod lays in the rebirth of the mixtape. too many users developing too high skills in putting their own playlists together, much more diverse than any radio formula can ever get. when you combine a number of horizontal flows (aka playlists), and let the computer switch from one to the other based on what it should record, it is possible to listen to all live jazz recordings in a whole radio spectrum, plus your own favorite sports and news shows in 3 languages. Podcasting hints on the possibility of a universal radio recorder, which adapts to your tastes and does not care about loyality to one station of copyright license until you are really loyal. Soon on a telephone next to you.

the art of missing the show

the assumption is on the other hand, that listeners eagerly wait for their favorite show, that they know what they want, and that they are careful listeners, who take their own time as the most valuable thing. how about those who want to forget time? who want to get over the day, through the traffic jam, down an elevator? music is more and more used, to make the passing of time less unbearable to experience. on the other hand, only a few feel bad missing every day thousands of hours of unique programming. the luxury of presence is something which is given by the observers. the live event is one you always aready missed. only a few people, take really good care of their media diet. and those who do, know that it can lead to an obsession, which makes you overly sensitive to the fastfood-content we are constanly bombarded with. like any good archive, the question is how to delete, what to include and what not. What you can do with RSS is getting more connected with all the stuff you never wanted to know about.

disappearing into the future

what is annoying many people about rss is perfectly right, it is everywhere.  in the sense of computer science it has to become “transparent”, which means invisible. it works only in the way, that it is working invisibly for the user, so it is not part of the user interface anymore. the next generation of digital media will not show you any “rss button”. you might not even know what you like and while you listen, you leave patterns, which are compared with the ones of others, and finally you listen to your own demographic profile. it means that music is more and more a machinic process of selection. the form of the radio show, its rituals, its voice and ueber-present personality of the Data-DJ, they are already back in the world of podcasting and blogging. RSS buttons are just the feel of the tentacles of this uncanny state of media, get used to it.

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