Paul Boutin

Skip the politics until, oh, September. Meanwhile, read the mob experts’ guide to The Sopranos and the cocktail party summary of Jayson Blair’s book, so you don’t have to pay him for it.

RSS is, in short, a great idea. But in order to spread its adoption from blogs to large-scale publications, a few extra tags would help. All of these are parameters us BigPub media whores care about, as do our readers. This information, encoded as tags rather than random text strings in an item, would help human readers - or better yet, their software - decide whether or not to prioritize and read an item.

byline - the current author tag is specified as an email address only, in case the reader wants to reply. But we know that readers are drawn to specific authors, e.g. Bruce Sterling vs Mickey Kaus vs Paul Boutin. If P.J. O’Rourke or Michael Crichton did a guest article on Slate, none of the RSS audience would know. It would be great if publications could identify the name (rather than the email) of the writer, so RSS fans can keep up on their favorite authors, subscribe to them, etc, and likewise avoid those they don’t want to read.

publication - This seems obvious, especially for aggregated feeds like Channel Dean. I can’t tell what’s originally from the NY Times, Fox News, Mother Jones, or Dave’s blog without clicking through. Relying on a human editor to include that info in the summary field seems like a bad idea.

wordcount - Less mission-critical than the above two, yet relevant. Is this a 300 word paragraph, a three thousand word magazine feature, or a 30,000-word book? That would help readers decide what to read and when. Granted, most casual readers don’t know how long 300 words is, but I’m pretty sure they would develop a sense of that over time, given daily examples. Perhaps this could be length in bytes or something, but that gets confusing with enclosures and markup involved. Do more people (as opposed to more developers) grok bytes or wordcount? I don’t know.

section - Front page? World? National? Local? Arts? Technology? Webhead? Gearbox? Slate and others use category for this. But unless I misunderstand the spec, a category is meant to be something larger than a publication, rather than a subset of a single pub.

I’m sure everyone has a tag they want added to the spec. But as a writer, rather than a publisher or a nameless employee of one, these are the important parameters to me and my readers. As metadata, they would help us decide rather or not an item in a feed is worth looking at, based on important traits. But they’re not captured by the current set of RSS 2.0 tags. I hardly have time to get involved in it, but there’s my two cents.

A good question from my bartender Dave at the Four Seasons tonight: It seems obvious that Kerry should ask Edwards to be VP solely in order to maximize his vote. The real question is, what will Edwards say? If he says no, will he send away more potential votes than Nader did in 2000? After all, the real issue isn’t whether any one person can be switched between Bush and Kerry, but whether any one person can be convinced to show up and vote.