Page III: Redmond's U-turn on abbreviating Web logs may portend a looming bandwidth crunch.
Scoble said the problem is that RSS readers typically are set by default to query RSS servers for new content on the hour. Multiplied by thousands of blogs and many more readers, that creates a huge bandwidth demand.
Scoble's solution is to abandon the automatic hourly queries, known as "polling."
"Lots of people have a vested interest in seeing RSS expanded," Scoble said. "I want to see that too, but I want people to be aware that they are putting strain on the systems if they are polling all day long. I've personally changed my defaults to only poll manually--right before I start reading the feeds. If aggregator producers changed the defaults, that'd really help."
Scoble echoed widespread criticism of the practice--exemplified by Microsoft's MSDN feed--of aggregating many hundreds of blogs in a group feed. The alternative, initially more time-consuming for the blog subscriber, is to select and subscribe to blogs individually.
An alternative
Others are turning their hopes to a neglected extension of the Internet's fundamental transport protocol, HTTP.
That extension, RFC (Request for Comment) 3229, lets Web browsers and RSS readers request from Web servers and RSS syndicators only information that is new since the last request.
While RFC 3229 has seen little adoption on the Web, blogging enthusiasts are hoping that it will help blog syndication meet the significant bandwidth challenge facing it.
PubSub Concepts, for example, scans millions of blogs continually to provide its subscribers with alerts within seconds of when certain keywords show up. Absent widespread implementation of RFC 3229, the company finds that it is scanning the same material over and over again, a substantially wasteful exercise.
"We read 3 million RSS files a day multiple times, and most of what we read is junk," said Bob Wyman, chief technology officer of PubSub Concepts in New York. "Only about 3 (percent) to 4 percent of the data is new. From our point of view, RFC 3229 would be a lot better for us because our bandwidth consumption would go down by as much as--let's be conservative here--70 (percent) to 80 percent. It's such a large saving that we know it's going to be massive."
Rather than polling, Wyman suggests that the blogging world revisit a concept long abandoned as an Internet nonstarter--push technology, made famous by the failed early start-up Pointcast.
Instead of pulling down large feeds of blogs at regular intervals, Wyman advocates using his scan-and-notify method to selectively send or "push" blog postings to subscribers when they include specified keywords or subjects.
RFC 3229 took a small but significant step forward Wednesday when blogging software WordPress gained an an extension that supports it.
Wyman acknowledged that headaches caused by blog bandwidth demand were showing up primarily in exceptional circumstances, for example his specialized search service and Microsoft's huge and active blogging community.
But Microsoft's problem today is the Internet's tomorrow, he warned.
"At Microsoft, anything they do they wind up with quite a large audience," Wyman said. "But they've just hit this problem sooner. Others will too."
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