Friday, April 30, 2004

Washington Post Net Falls, Revenue Rises (Reuters). Reuters - Washington Post Co. (WPO.N) said on Friday that quarterly net profit fell from a year ago, when results included a gain from the sale of its stake in the International Herald Tribune, but revenue jumped on the strength of its educational unit.  The Kaplan educational division, which last year surpassed the publishing unit as the company's biggest source of revenue, saw quarterly revenue grow 45 percent to $258.3 million. [Yahoo! News - Entertainment] Kaplan owns Concord Law School. 1:15:01 PM    comment []  trackback []

Will RSS Readers Clog the Web?. Sure, news aggregators are handy tools, making Web surfing a breeze. But the programs are greedy little buggers that swamp websites with unwanted traffic. Something has to change, and soon. By Ryan Singel. [Wired News] Despite the tone of the headline, this article does a good job of highlighting some the growth pains being experienced in the RSS world.  There are 2 areas worth noting that can make RSS and aggregation more efficient and avoid the clogging problems.  For content providers, limit the amount of content in the feed.  Give just enough information to get the point across.  If the consumer wants to read more, they can click through to the site.  If you encapsulate all of your content in a publicly available feed, you tie up lots of bandwidth and don't draw people to your site.  For aggregator developers, remember that RSS is not email.  While the RSS format is simple, aggregation shouldn't be.  A good aggregator will only check sources once an hour, will have a database backend to archive feeds as needed, and will check RSS feeds to only fetch the feed if it has changed.  All of these are key to keeping bandwidth usage to a minimum. Taken together these things will help reduce the clogging effect caused by RSS feeds.  Beyond this work needs to be down to determine if the use of RSS feeds using HTTP for transport is a good scalable and long term solution.  If not what are the alternatives?  SOAP? XML-RPC? A new protocol for feeds? 8:36:06 AM    comment []  trackback []