From Michael Bernstein, the Zombie-Teenager Peace Process:

Other news outlets were more even in their coverage of the latest events. The New York Times criticized the Zombies for "their ill-advised eating of teenagers," but also criticize the teenagers for "their equally ill-advised efforts to stop the Zombies from eating teenagers."

Lots of folks have been complaining about dischord in the ranks.

Balderdash!

The Atom/Echo/Pie people all want RSS to live a long and happy life. We talked about this at the Pie dinner a few weeks ago. All of the newsreader makers who were there expect to support RSS forever. And there will undoubtedly be publishers who choose RSS for its technical speed and simplicity.   

Dave Winer is reinvigorating RSS and the metaweblogAPI with new documentation and implementations, all while wishingthe Atom/Echo/Pie people the best of luck.

There are technical differences of opinion, mostly coming from different use cases and engineering philosophies. But Dave respects the enthusiasm, effort, and imagination the crew put into inventing a new syndication format/API. And everyone respects Dave's pioneering and evangelism that made RSS as widespread as it is today.

One thing we all share is hopeful memetic darwinism: wishing that the best ideas propagate and survive, and lead to even better ideas.

Tim Bray measured the RSS traffic to his personal weblog. He came up with these numbers for a day with one change:

• 11,526 GET requests (about 8 per minute)
• 8,901 returned the no-change (code 304) 77%
• 2,625 returned the data (code 200). 23%
• 359 HEAD requests.
• 1,374 unique IP addresses.

Tim's work with Antarctica.net touches thousands of people. His professional network will be early adopters, so tracking Tim's blog would be natural.

Of note, Tim made a change. "The code that changes the picture-of-the-day every ten minutes or so was also as a side-effect re-writing the RSS. So I fixed it." It's probably saving him 1.5 GB/month in downloads. Who's going to write the book on RSS optimization? 

About four weeks' ago I wrote about Scaling Echo: P2P and Cached Feeds. I drew a few conclusions:

1. The syndicated blogosphere will reach 300 million feeds in 3 years
2. Feed payloads will grow 100 to 10,000 times
3. Each reader may consume 1000 feeds
4. Syndication Growth = Denial Of Service
5. Two architectures will support this scale:
   • Peer-To-Peer (P2P)
   • Caching by intermediaries (communal aggregators)

Jevon wrote about scaling new post pinging.

We need to have aggregators that send their subscriptions into a cloud and get pings back that have gone in to that cloud at any other point. It could be called a "peer to peer subscription and message delivery system", or "distributed redundant notification network", or whatever. But as soon as we can build a message network layer, Microcontent will really be ready for the next level: integration into our active lives.

Phrases like "community ping relay servers", "supernode", and "ping cloud" make my day. 

[a klog apart klogs]