More on Hardware-Based RSS Apps

Imagine this scenario, if you will. You're on your way to work in the morning. You start up your car and turn on your rich-media RSS radio. Overnight, your car has downloaded your nightly allotment of news headlines that you've programmed it to do, based on a number of keyword filters.

So on your drive to work, you can listen to the headlines. If something interests you, you speak a command, and you get the full story. The car uses the same satellite system as the GPS unit you've had installed. When you arrive at your regular parking spot, you can detach the RSS radio unit and take it into work with you, to review some stories while having coffee.

Or, if you take public transit, you take your RSS video player along with you and watch news or other clips, using a small control unit to signal if you want full-video or just excerpts. And like any portable player unit, headphones are available for privacy.

Or maybe you want a live audio or video feed that you can consume just like a radio or TV program so that you don't have set up keyword filters. While you're watching, your screen suddenly pauses and a small window pops up. It's a friend calling. You can either have the unit take a video/audio message or take the call.

Personally, having once worked for a telecom giant and having had to carry around two pagers and two cellphones simultaneously, I'm all for an all-in-one, easy to use media unit: cell phone, radio, TV/video player, and Internet browser in one palm-sized device. Or maybe slightly larger. With roll-up, paper-thin electronic screens already in the works, you could even have a device that fits in a coat pocket but rolls out into a relatively large screen.

These scenarios don't sound too much like science fiction to me, as all the necessary technology already exists. The holdbacks right now might be the lack of a widespread wi-fi or satellite network infrastructure, and whether or not consumer electronics companies have a similar vision for their future products.

If RSS or Atom can be tweaked slightly to support such rich-media, programmable and individual content syndication and downloading, these are the types of "killer" content syndication applications that I see for the very near future.

Now if you're buying into this whole scenario, picture one more thing. You're walking around downtown in a large city. There's a large digital billboard with some sort of video feed running. You aim your device at the billboard, press a button, and voila: you've just subscribed to the displayed feed on your own device.

If there's a charge for the feed, it'll show up on your screen, so you cancel if you want, or pick your micro-payment method. Who needs a (Internet) TV guide when feed URLs can be pased along virally using Bluetooth or some other wireless communication between devices?

If you want to read another article with a similar viewpoint, read Email Objects in the Review Mirror, by Bill Nussey, starting about halfway down the page.