Infoworld CTO on RSS growing pains July 20th

Chad Dickerson of Infoworld is talking about pros and cons of the gained popularity of RSS (which will hopefully get another boost with the new RSS functionality Apple is preparing for a Safari update shipping with the next version of Mac OS X “Tiger”. [Article found through Slashdot]

When Dave Sifry at Technorati reports that the median time from Weblog content posting until that content is available for search on Technorati is seven minutes, I see a paradigm shifting. Despite “only” being XML, RSS is the driving force fulfilling the Web’s original promise: making the Web useful in an exciting, real-time way.

Update: What makes me even more nervous than having a bunch of programmatically refreshing RSS readers hit my sites are dubious requests from Internet Explorer browser plugins and what not which try to mirror a whole (dynamically generated, I might add) site or just misbehave on recursively mirroring something else. Looking at the top potential abusers over at freshmeat I see User-Agents like “Yahoo! Slurp”, “WebDup”, “WebCopier”, “Ask Jeeves”, “ia_archiver”, etc., each with multi-thousand page requests within 24 hours.