Disney/RSS Presentation, Etech, Tues 2/10 2pm Mike Pusatieri, Elisabeth Freeman, Eric Freeman On the doc: Liz Lawley, Jim Coyer, Jukka Kansanaho, Trevor Smith, Timothy Appnel, Doc Searls, Kevin Marks, Joe Hughes, Tom Coates ========================================================================= How do you convince a content provider to give content away for free? abcnews using xslt based system for repurosing content feeds to the public web site; about to upgrade from v.93 to 2.0; goal is "click-back" to site. separation of content & presentation is still a challenge ongoing evolution of rss is problematic; will the standard be supported by tools and by users? (are they thinking about atom at all?) encourage use of weblogs by creators of editorial content; abcnews/political commentary; movies.com with both editorial and user-developed content; espn.com "page 2" content. "How do you control what the users are going to post?" A real problem for them. (And for any organization that develops content for or targets young users. Next speaker- focused on "massive content delivery" with RSS. bandwidth constraints are a problem in terms of both expense and capacity. Used Winer/Curry suggested appproach using the enclosure tag. The idea being the rich media could be syndicated and downloaded asychronously in the background. Enclosures don't scale. Not enough bandwidth. ESPN is delivering enclosures in mass -- can scale, caching to the edge. Even the little guy can participate using P2P. Mike Pustieri (Argyle) on Information flow; need for bidirectional information flow. (cf Manuel Castells) Consistent flow is critical. Too many emails. People don't like logging in. They like it coming to them. "Shift Logs" used to report info to coworkers and mgt about what ocurred on a shift. Used to use Foxpro DB....changed to MT. Called them "shift logs" instead of "web logs" and everyone loved them. :) Brilliant social engineering. Instead of email notification, they used RSS feeds, using newsgator (because it works inside outlook, which is disney standard client) RSS Feed reduced use of email. (This is a key selling point for people in busy organizations...) Ratings info is also needed daily. Instead of sending email saying "go to web site," they can instead use RSS and include content. Argues that there has to be style information in the RSS feed. (The argument is that you should make this *optional*, not force users into a specific display mode.) Future Directions News clipping service. (current web app) Playdate memo changes (current email) Addition of RSS feeds to existing intranet portals modules. Use of Atom to replace RSS (when 1.0 arrives) and compliant tools for simple publishing. Interested in Atom because it provides better bidirectional support, and potentially better vendor support. Conclusions RSS feeds and weblog software are useful for multitude of business needs where info flow is critical. Rss feeds are for much more then weblog syndication Use of RSS feeds is inexpensive compared to other software solutions Integration of RSS aggregation into email client was critical to adoption in Disney. (NewsGator) MISSED ONE. Client side aggregation needs to move toward server side aggregation. Need for authentification is needed. immediate. Authentication very important for them; not just http authentication. Showing a Disney Wiki (oooo....pretty...Nemo! :); changes sent via RSS Ack! they took away the wiki slide. (amazing a pretty wiki! A rare sight.) Wireless group is using wiki heavily as part of their development of games for mobile devices. Also using pMachine for disseminating/sharing/discussing information. - RSS provides simple, standard format for repurposing internal data feeds. - Weblogs are a greate way to easily disseminate and share information. - Need people willing to share information to get people to use blogs, wiki... collaborative systems - XML/RSS software infrastructure can be reused for a variety of needs: inexpensive solution. question: how many blogs? how many bloggers? how many wikis? how many wiki users operations group - 100 people using 6 weblogs (Mike) elisabeth - 1 blog, about 50 users, 30 of them regular; wiki is 1.5 yrs old, has over 100 users. has been very successful. question: are they involved in standards development? answer: unclear. have to go, folks...want to see joi et al on their panel. ________________________________________________________________________ Here are my notes - you might find them useful (Tom Coates) Leveraging RSS at Disney: from Collaboration to Massive Content Delivery ________________________________________________________________________ Disney uses RSS to bring in lots of syndicated content from other Disney sites onto the Go.com portal. This meant for little or no money the site could operate and run itself and apparently it's still a money-spinner. Those same RSS feeds were used for mobile devices, the Disney Enterprise Portal and used to provide for External Content Providers. Now trying to release RSS feeds out the the general public for free. Not easy to convince a money-making organisation and content provider. A year and a half ago did a white-paper which demonstrated that blogs were having a huge impact on search results (first three entries on Google for Michael Eisner were blogs). Been difficult to explain that giving your content away for free doesn't result in less eyeballs onto your site and less revenue. ABCnews.com take the XSLT-based system to repurpose 10-12 feeds using .93, plans to upgrade to 2.0 in the next few months. GOAL FOR THEM TO DISTRIBUTE ABCNEWS.COM CONTENT AS FAR AS POSSIBLE OVER THE INTERNET AND USING THEM TO CREATE LINKS BACK TO THE MAIN SITE VIA THEM. ABCNews are now gradually being persuaded to create content that's not full of HTML tags. They're moving towards making the content fully available to users via RSS. Their main concern is HOW IS IT GOING TO BE USED. Can it be republished and what does the context constitute. They're really struggling with these issues. ABCNews is encouraging use of weblogs by creators of editorail content on their sites. The note on ABCNews is already very blog-like and they're encouraging to make it more so and to syndicate it. Movies.com and The Ebert people are also interesting... ________________________________________________________________________ Massive Content Delivery with RSS Challenge - deliver great broadband experiences to our website users. - no 'click and wait' / 'high quality video', 'target users that want broadband experience' - Problems: bitrate is still too small, bits are expensive to ship. They want good quality video clips on the front page or in the pages of the site. Adds a rich content payload to an RSS item - ABC Motion - look into it at some point. The media clients are little RSS aggregators that will download and precache audio and video items etc. They hoped they'd get 500k users in 12 months, but actually got 1 million user in three weeks. In fact they now have over 2 million yusers which results in 2Gpbs of sustained bandwidth during the day shopping 20/25 TB per day. (Small-backgrounded RSS aggregators doing stuff...) "One of the biggest internet products they've released in the last couple of years" Some have argued against RSS ENclosures: - don't sccale - not enough bandwidth But: - more than 500 million videos delivered in less than one year - able to scale bandwidth They pay for PEAK bandwidth and schedule the RSS distribution to non-peak periods, thus actually making it pretty much free... P2P could make this even easier / BitTorrent equivalents. ________________________________________________________________________ Information flow is crucial and it's the thing they actually want to get going. Past solutions: Paper reports Web applications Web applications with e-mail call to action Problems abound: People don't like logging in People don't know when new information arrives Difficult to forward information Shift Logs: Used Movable Type (got a good / fair price and feed back thoughts on functionality and the like) as "shift logs" to help people keep track of what's been going on each day. New weblog style shift logs became popular, but imediate requests for e-mail began Instead of e-mail notification they used RSS feeds Used Newsgator - integrated with OUTLOOK (We should do this - this is fucking awesome) Other things they are working on: Discrepancy reports: Detailed information on mistakes, problems or othe events that affect the broadcast Rss feed reduced use of e-mail Ratings information People have a daily need for overnight ratings information This is the kind of thing that's generated for a website, but could also be organised as an RSS feed that people could have integrated with their e-mail programme. Future directions: Moving towards Atom to replace RSS (when 1.0 arrives) Syndication of some media content for review Conclusions: RSS feeds and weblog software are profoundly useful for multitude of business needs where information flow is critical RSS feeds are for much more than weblog syndication Integration of RSS aggregation into email client was critical to adoption in Disney. (NewsGator) MISSED ONE. Need for authentification is needed.