Rolling Stone supports RSS 2.0

Wednesday, July 30, 2003 by Dave Winer.

Sex, drugs, rock & roll? 

In the last piece I talked about the transfer of the RSS 2.0 specification from UserLand to Berkman Center at Harvard Law School. That's interesting, of course, to people who are concerned with technology, but what about people whose concern is sex, drugs and rock and roll? Well, we have something for them too.

Ready to roll 

While I was in California earlier this month, along with business and social duties, I also worked with the production people at RollingStone.Com to get their content flowing through the emerging network of RSS software tools. The whole process, from beginning to end, took about two weeks. And today, we're ready for everyone to start subscribing to their feeds.

Here's what RSS looks like 

There's a sub-directory containing links to all the feeds, and a place for questions and comments, but I wanted to publish the URLs of the feeds themselves here so that you can see how simple and easy the format is.

http://www.rollingstone.com/rssxml/album_reviews.xml

http://www.rollingstone.com/rssxml/movie_reviews.xml

http://www.rollingstone.com/rssxml/dvd_reviews.xml

http://www.rollingstone.com/rssxml/music_news.xml

http://www.rollingstone.com/rssxml/photos.xml

It's designed to be comprehensible to a person who might know how to set up a stereo system or program a VCR. And it's even easier to use than either of those earlier technologies. You just tell a reader (there are lots, it's a burgeoning market) to subscribe to one or all of these feeds, and every hour it will check for new stuff and show it to you.

The advantage to Rolling Stone, the publisher, is increased distribution for their CD, DVD and movie reviews, picture essays and music news.

That's all there is to it 

If you know someone who's been ranting about RSS being the future of the free world, please send them these links and watch them zoooom into outer space.

Namaste y'all and we're still diggin!

Dave Winer