I'm reposting this here from comments on this post:

All:

Great comments so far. Very interesting discussion. Let's explore some other real-life situations where things needed to change but the situation didn't.

Stop signals:

Two roads cross creating an intersection. There is a shared goal for all intersection users: allow free flow of traffic but minimize the potential for accidents. First, stop signals were whistles, but later semaphores and then finally colored lights. What hasn't changed? Why, it's the color of the lights, folks. Red means stop, weather it's on a static sign or a colored light. The mechanism has changed over the last 100 years, but the concept is the same.

Most importantly, the shared goal of traffic control hasn't changed. The world of RSS/Atom/content-syndication does not have a shared goal. Therefore, there cannot be a universally accepted method of “signalling” a way to subscribe to a content feed.

Read my traffic signalling source site: Dave's Traffic Signal Page

The last paragraph contains a lesson for us all: “However, these early electric traffic signals provided little flexibility in traffic coordination as compared to the observations of a police officer. This led to the development of traffic signal coordination. The first coordination development was the simultaneous traffic signal system which was installed in Houston, Texas in 1922. In this system, all the traffic signals on the main roadway would change to green at the same time. After that, the next coordination development was the alternate traffic signal system which was installed in the District of Columbia in 1926. The alternate system is the type of coordination system that is used today.”

Mulitple systems that do the same thing don't offer the user the flexibility to coordinate traffic (subscribed content). We need a coordinated development with a shared goal. Not a goal that everyone likes, a shared goal. Focus on the shared goal and the traffic lights will turn green.

There's a debate in comments about a Dave Winer 'rant' on a contest to rename RSS. This nugget was in the comments:

Saying that the only way to get content is to have aggregators pulling it is missing a whole other way of doing it, that's proven itself as scalable and resilient over the years: NNTP

I'm not talking about using NNTP directly but taking ideas from it. Having a network of servers that talk to each other, where items propagate between servers, and where users talk to a single server that's close to them instead of reaching all over the world to poll, makes a lot more sense.

Rather than having a million aggregators hitting 20 or 30 sites an hour each, those million aggregators would talk to server, and the servers would talk to each other, so that your aggregator client would simply talk to an “RSS Server” near you to pick up all the things you subscribed to.

No polling involved – at least, not polling of the sites themselves.

If email was implemented the way RSS is implemented, then my mail client would be polling all my friends every half hour to see if they've sent me an email. Nobody would implement email that way – but that's what RSS is.

SMTP moves mail from the author to a server close to the user, in the background, maybe involving multiple servers in between. Long term, I think this is going to have to happen with RSS as well.
Steve Tibbett [apple] 12/9/03; 5:07:54 PM

My favorite part is the sentence about email working like RSS. Classic.

Beta: pReSS 0.1. pReSS is a tool for authoring RSS 2.0 news feeds, with support for the entire RSS specification including channel image, skip hours/days, categories, cloud, and news enclosures. [MacInTouch]

What a difference four years makes:

http://www.scripting.com/defaultx.html

Read the link and come back….

Check out the directory listing at the top of the page. Smile at Dave's old picture. Remember where we came from and read some of the posts. Not much has changed in concept (convince people to use new technology in new ways) but the adoption rate is *much* larger.

Here's a real gem from that page:

http://discuss.userland.com/msgReader$8047

Radio's aggregator has made me the happiest the most often, but it's doing something I can't control: deleting subscriptions. There's a pref setting “Number of errors before automatic unsubscribe” and you can put any number in there you want. Somehow, though, I've lost two subscriptions in the last three days.

I find this frustrating, but according to Steven Covey, “urgent but not important”. The event log is informative on some things, but not this. My only recourse is to go back to a page published last week and compare the subscription list (generated by mySubscriptions.opml at the time) to the one I currently have.

I wonder what new management will do for Userland? More money? More resources? Even better software?