It's hard to believe that RSS has been around long enough for it to
have traditionalist old school practices and 'new' approaches
such as that the Guardian has recently announced (where new is essentially the old school 1.0 version of RSS feeds before people thought of making money from them, of course). From Matt McAlister at the Inside Guardian.co.uk blog comes the news of a major upgrade to the site's RSS feeds.

Matt writes: "Two significant new features are worth noting.First, every
feed across the site includes the full content for each article. We've
also embedded related links pointing people to more information on the
web site. This way people can get the guardian.co.uk experience in
whatever context is most useful to them. Second,
advertising will soon appear within each full content feed item. Ads
won't appear in the items which we display only as summaries."

There
are some exceptions; cartoons, images and some of the other
in-article elements that appear with articles on guardian.co.uk won't
always be included, and if The Graun has any doubts about its rights to
publish the full text of an
article in the context of RSS, it'll only provide a summary and a link
to the full version on the main
guardian.co.uk site.

Guardian columnist Jeff Jarvis is all for what he calls a bold experiment: "I know this is somewhat
nerve-making in media: Why should we put all our content out there on
a feed without getting people to come to our pages and see all our ads?
A few answers. First, many people won’t click through. Take ‘em when
you got ‘em. Second, think distributed; that’s my first WWGD? rule for
news organizations. You have to go to where the people are. RSS is home
delivery 2.0. Third, the feeds will have ads and though there’ll be
fewer of them, the potential for more audience reading more stories is
great."

As always, one of the joys of social media is watching the audience engage with and thus influence the product – this case is no exception.

Google gets behind OpenID in its own special way
OpenID, the open and decentralized identity system designed "not to crumble if one company turns evil or goes out of business", just got sexier and/or more credible with the announcement that Google is now an OpenID provider.

John McRea, head of marketing at Plaxo (one of the first sites to accept a Google account for signup and sign in), blogs a very excited description of the upcoming 'Open Stack' which in his words "will fix so much of what is currently broken."

"Today, every time you go to use a new website, you have to give the
site your email address and choose a password; you have to upload a
photo and fill out the same profile info you’ve done dozens of times
before; and, you’ll probably be encouraged to import your address book
and invite your friends. The new Open Stack approach can take almost
all of the friction out of that process."

Eric Krangel at Silicon Alley Insider is cynical at best:
"It'll never happen — at least not the way it's promised. For better
or
for worse, OpenID is one of those utopian ideas championed by
"open"-type nerds — one that in actual practice never lives up to the
"this will change everything" hype. Kind of like Linux as a consumer
OS. [...] We don't think OpenID will ever work as designed. Instead of
creating an open-source 'no one owns it' identity solution, the OpenID
push will likely mean more small players will accept incoming logins,
while the biggest players in identity management (Google, Yahoo,
Microsoft, AOL) consolidate their hold on users. Which, as
profit-minded competitors, they probably should. Not exactly the OpenID
dream. But not surprising."

Flickr privacy map speaks volumes
On the subject of openness and privacy, Mike Arrington posted a revealing picture of global attitudes to privacy
embodied in Flickr user privacy settings circa 2005. He notes: "The
results are fascinating. The US is widely public except for users
who seem to be hovering around Utah, and varies by state. Europe, by
contrast, is largely private, and more so as you move north. The Middle
East is wide open. South East Asia is mixed. India is private."

Of course, that was three years ago – a generation in social media terms. It'd be mighty interesting to see how that map looks today.

–Basheera Khan