An interview in a podcast

I was interviewed by a reporter from the Chicago Tribune with questions about RSS.

What is RSS? Automated web surfing.

Is RSS ready for civillians? I didn't know then but the answer is no. Until it's very easy to subscribe to a feed you'll have to do a lot of difficult work to subscribe to a feed. I didn't know it at the time, but two years later a product called Twitter would be introduced that solves the subscription problem and that event would put a cap on the growth of RSS.

If you could tell people one thing about RSS? It's not email, it's news. You don't read every story in every issue of the newspaper. However, esp at the time, there was a presumption that you wanted to read every email. I favored a timeline approach which would be what Twitter did a couple of years later.

I'm very very longwinded!

In the shownotes it says that it begins with two outtakes. I remember that feeling from twenty years ago. It's not something my current software would let me do. I was using Polderbits, today I use Apple's voice memo app.

A link to the blog page for July 14, 2004.