Tong Family

XML Syndication Supporters Mulling W3C Move. I’ve never gotten to understand the deep issues in this debate. XML is so easy to read (check the RSS 1.0, 2.0 and Atom feeds on this Blogs as an example), but maybe time to start thinking about it.
Some folks like “Steve Gillmore”:http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1413403,00.asp have argued that RSS and BitTorrent are two very important new technolgies. I get the latter, but not necessarily the former. That’s because RSS lets you read a blog in essence without needing to open a web page. It is just the text and other stuff. Of course, you have to poll for it still, but its in a format that isn’t a markup language, it is just the pure data.
If you layer it on top of the Bit Torrent idea. That is, there is a tracker node that folks who want a file (e.g., a feed) send a message to. The tracker responds with a list of all other people doing the download and then you can share blocks between them so it is amazingly fast and distributed.