Jeffrey comments on the scope of RSS for publishing a flavor of your site to the world. His comments make sense, and this take on the uses of “syndication” formats is well balanced.
However, consider a site which has no site. If I had valuable content to publish (perhaps if I were a fashionable, high-flying freelance columnist) I might publish my content for syndication on a number of sites (or physical publications), who would pay me a sum for every article received. Such publications could be spread across the globe, making the internet an obvious choice for communication. Suppose I make my living this way, and each of the organizations that publish my work conduct business this way with each freelancer they commission work from. I think we’d find RSS limiting.
The flip-side of the coin is where I, as a struggling freelance hack have to electronically submit my articles to my local rag else I don’t get paid. I’m not technical, so I need support in the tools I have on my desktop for this publishing mechanism:- hence the need for a standard publishing API (read: mechanism).
Those are just two basic examples, but they’re not unrealistic. Look at the standards we have in place for money transfer, postal delivery and so on. This isn’t a brave new world. This is the stuff that we humans have been working on for ages now – simple standards to allow us to get to the pub more quickly at the end of the day. This is why we need Echo.
(There’s no Charlie or Bravo I’m afraid)
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