peace on the web, too

There is a lot of buzz on the web right now about rss, xml, subscriptions etc. - all forms of subscribing to the content of a site. It all comes down to the ability of a reader (a human one) to subscribe to a content publisher or provider.

Of course, this idea coming from the blogs world or having the more impact on blog readers, it is right now covered with a lot of techie talk (like those 3 letter acronyms on the upper paragraph). I really hate it, and I have a lot of difficulties to explain this - rather simple - subscription idea to a non-tech person.

Why wouldn’t we think more generally? I see this possibilities that are not enough explored for now:

• email subscription:
  We already have email subscription for newsletters and email groups, why not use it? I am testing right now a site providing this service (http://www.kbcafe.com/rmail.aspx) but there are some more offering this. However they seem limited to a newsletter approach. You get emails with articles. This is a passive approach, which can be just fine for starters. But why wouldn’t we have the possibility to use the subscription site as a reader too?
• tag/category/search subscription:
  Almost all blog engines I saw provide automatic feed creation for the whole site. I would need a more dynamic approach: subscribing to a tag/category, to a search on my blog (look a the searched words as to “proposed tags” and you’ll get a new way of discussion), to a “fixed” page (like “about”) etc.
• subscription items look:
  Why on earth the readers available today don’t propose a (default) view of a blog paying respect to the original look (style)? A microformat on such a thing could help perhaps. Anyway, the look of the posts is an issue for, but not limited to, design people mostly.
• subscribe to a static page:
  I don’t know why I can’t subscribe to a “static” site in the first place! The “posts” could contain only the changed content, all the content with the changes highlighted etc.

Almost all the issues I see on this subscription issue come down to this: subscribing to any web content should be simple, non-technical and possible through all the classic or modern ways. Applying this principle would produce new ideas/approaches that would improve further the dialog between the reader and the writer (as my idea of “proposed tags” that I come up with whne writing this post).