PC: In general our users are java developers who create applications dealing with feeds. We haven’t done an extensive study about who uses ROME for what, so all we have as an indicator is people who added their project to the Powered By ROME Wiki page, and questions asked in the users and developers mailing lists. I categorize our users along 2 axis: open source vs closed source developers, and type of applications.
There are a few open source projects using ROME, from Wikis (xWiki, SnipSnap) to Dave Johnson’s new Roller Planet aggregator. ScheduleWorld, a Calendaring application, FeedPod, which uses a speech to text library to add sound enclosures to your textual feed.
And there are commercial offerings, such as Public Interactive, which provides podcasting capabilities to Radios in the US, and Reger.com, where Joe Reger uses ROME to explore new grounds in what he calls Data Blogging.
WahoO! Reger.com and datablogging mention. This interview was linked to from The Server Side so it's certainly getting lots of traffic. Gotta love it. Thanks for the mention Patrick.
Patrick has been great to work with over the last, what, couple years or so since ROME came out. I was an early adopter. Initially the Java RSS library didn't do all of what I needed it to do. After a few months and a lot of back and forth, Patrick and the group announced a modules infrastructure that allowed me to write a complete namespace into ROME.
ROME now powers all of the RSS feeds created on Reger.com. From a usability perspective I probably offer too many feeds to users all at once, but I just enjoy it from a geeky standards-be-damned perspective.
Later in the article more on datablogging:
iB: Do you see any trends in the use of RSS and Atom? What changes do you see in the next year or two for syndicated feeds in the marketplace?
PC: I’ve spoken a bit about that in my blog entry about the typology of syndication applications, and in my recent XTech 2005 ROME presentation. I’ll talk about it in our common session at JavaOne June 30th Beyond Blogging: Feed Syndication and Publishing With Java™ Technology
To summarize, what I see coming is: [snip] * Syndication formats as an alternative envelope format (alternative to SOAP) for time based results of REST style web services calls. RSS started as a content aggregation technology but will evolve in an application integration envelope format, with people embedding namespaced application specific meta data in an RSS or Atom envelope. Amazon a9 opensearch extension to RSS 2.0 is a good example of that. But I think things like UBL may end up being embedded in a syndication envelope for B2B applications data interchange. Joe Reger with his Structured Blogging experiments (last year he started adding Marathon related meta data in his feed), and Bob Wyman’s Data Blogging proposals are hints that this will happen sooner than later. ROME modules were created with this type of use case in mind.
Note that I've stripped out other things that he saw coming and focused this blog entry on Reger.com.
Great to see him mentioning us as something forthcoming. I think I'll send this link to the folks at the RSS Investor's Fund again.
And, of course, I can't agree more. The content-creation that Reger.com allows combined with flexible RSS formats will empower Web 2.0.
Step Down Knee Issue