They're all the rage

Alan Bjerga references your humble scribbler today. Thanks Alan!

He also references this article from CNET news that I found interesting as a new blogger. Apparently blogs are taking up a lot of bandwidth on the 'net. As a blogging neophyte, I was momentarily confused. Surely, all these blogs can't be generating that much traffic, can they?

Reading on, I got the point. It's all these RSS feeds are the problem. All day long, these feeds are supplying "news aggregators" with blog entries and news articles from all over cyberspace. You log on to one of these aggregators and you can get all of the news to which you subscribe all in one place. It's as if you could subscribe to a bunch of newspapers, have the headlines all combined onto one sheet of paper in your mailbox every day, and you can scan all the headlines reading just the ones that you want. Cool, huh? Yes, very. But when a lot of people do it, it generates a lot of 'net traffic.

So the article is interesting, but I'm not panicking. The blog phenomenon is still pretty new. The technology for managing the RSS feeds is pretty rudimentary. Reading the article and knowing little else about RSS, I gather that the RSS protocol was designed without any regard to bandwidth constraints. (RSS actually stands for "really simple syndication".) Who would have thought that blogging would take off in such a big way? I think it is safe to predict that they'll develop a new protocol that uses the scarce resource more efficiently.

But if this blog phenomenon gets any bigger, they might want to hurry it up!