At 3:43 PM -0500 11/26/03, Yakov Shafranovich wrote:
Bill Cole wrote:
At 5:04 PM +0000 11/26/03, Bruce Stephens wrote:
Bill Cole <asrg(_at_)billmail(_dot_)scconsult(_dot_)com> writes:
[...]
For the respectable end of the market (the confirmed opt-in, or
whatever the current phrase is), I agree completely---there's a space
for some use of RSS or something much more appropriate than email.
Actually, I suspect HTTP with perhaps some automated browser
configuration (to switch on monitoring of the relevant web page) would
be easier to get going.
That's a technique with 8 years of hard failure modes behind it. It
would be nice if there was a reliable lightweight standard way for
web browsers to detect significant changes of HTTP-accessible
documents, but there isn't. There's about an 80% solution, and the
ways that it does not work are non-trivial to solve.
Does RSS itself present a perfect consent system?
It seems so to me. RSS is strictly a client-initiated pull system. In
essence it is a layer of XML metadata describing resources which are
primarily transferred via HTTP at the request of the client.
The readers choose what to subscribe to, and when to unsubscribe,
with the them having complete control over consent to read or not
read certain communications?
Yes. The reader's RSS software (usually referred to as an
'aggregator') regularly updates whatever 'feeds' the user subscribes
to in order to present whatever might be new in those feeds. The
critical mass for RSS has come from weblogging software and sites
that provide RSS feeds. The RSS 2.0 spec is at
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss and there is a somewhat
competitive RDF-based RSS 1.0 that I gather has some serious
adherents as well.
If complete consent control can be created in email, with the sender
in charge at all times, then that would solve spam, since the sender
must actively subscribe to something to receive it. That is one of
the motiviations behind pull systems, where a hybrid approach of
push and pull is used.
I think that pull systems are less 'email' the more purely they
follow 'pull' models. The example of the blogging universe
predominantly using RSS as the means of content providers getting
material to readers rather than the traditional mailing list with all
of its clunkiness is a good sign.
Email may be the 'killer app' of the Internet that can be made to do
everything, but it is not designed to do everything well, and it may
simply be time to start narrowing what email is allowed to do in
order to push the traffic into more suitable media: many-way
discussions to NNTP, serial broadcast to RSS.
--
Bill Cole
bill(_at_)scconsult(_dot_)com
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