In reply to this:

I'm skeptical, because RSS really is no different than any other page fetched by Http - if sites like CNN, Drudge (etc) have solutions for their main page, then the truly popular RSS feeds will end up using these self same solutions.

I neglected to add a third requirement to the listing, which is that a weblog should be able to scale up without hammering the owner with bandwidth fees. The solution that sites like CNN and Drudge use is to throw more money at the problem, money a weblogger may not have.

Communication Ethics book part for Human Perception Integrity Defined. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

"Bandwidth efficiency" for RSS has come and gone as an issue, but it will come again; all improvements on the last pass were linear in nature, meaning that as more people come online the problem will rear its head again later. And next time, the "low-hanging" fruit will be gone.

There are two basic, fundamental problems with the current system:

1. When an RSS file changes, the entire RSS file is transferred. This provides basic limitation on how much bandwidth can be saved currently, through any technique of not downloading the entire file unless necessary, such as using Etags. For instance, Instapundit's RSS 1.0 file is 10KB; Scripting New's RSS file is 15KB. Start doing the bandwidth math and that's a lot of transfer. Many sites are even less efficient and have multi-hundred KB RSS files, many without knowing it. Every time the site changes, everybody gets a whole new copy. Very inefficient.
2. There is only one source for the changes. When Scripting News changes, everybody has to hammer Scripting.com.
3. Update: A third problem is that the only way to scale up right now is to spend more on bandwidth, money the blogger may not have. See this later posting.

Ideally, to keep the RSS system from imploding as more people come online, we need to reduce the number of bytes flowing per update, and we need to partially decentralize the system.

I was just seeing somebody on CNN pontificating on the "Roadmap to Peace" and once again it struck me how little I can stand the standard "network" news.

The "standard" media take such an infuriatingly naive view of events. They take everything anybody says at face value, from right-wing wackos and left-wing wackos, and everything in between. They live in a strange little fantasy land where only first-order effects matter and where everybody always says exactly what they are really intending. Oh, and simply attacking your current guest with no particular regard for logic or reason passes for "insightful commentary". (I've seen this from both O'Reilly and CNN, so it's not a right/left thing either.)

Communication Ethics book part for Human Perception Integrity. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

Communication Ethics book part for Concrete Message Integrity. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

"Artists have been deluding themselves for centuries with the notion that they create. In fact they do nothing of the sort. They discover. Inherent in the nature of reality are a number of combinations of musical tones that will be perceived as pleasing by a human central nervous system. For millennia we have been discovering them, implicit in the universe—and telling ourselves that we `created' them. To create implies infinite possibility, to discover implies finite possibility....

" `Ars longa, vita brevis est,' " she said at last. "There's been comfort of a kind in that for thousands of years. But art is long, not infinite. `The Magic goes away.' One day we will use it up—unless we can learn to recycle it like any other finite resource."

Communication Ethics book part for Message Integrity. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

Communication Ethics book part for Conclusion. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

Communication Ethics book part for Practical Privacy. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)