Will RSS Readers Clog the Web?

This is another interesting article!

News aggregators may be the best new tools to appear on the Web since the browser, but as the programs and the underlying RSS standard grow more popular, some question whether the Internet will be able to handle the traffic.

Aggregators, sometimes called newsreaders or RSS readers, are a hybrid of a Web browser and an e-mail program, allowing Web users to peruse hundreds of information sources, from Boston-based restaurant job listings to Taiwanese political blogs. The beauty of an aggregator is that it displays articles from hundreds of websites in one place, so the user doesn’t have to pull up the sites individually.

But some are wondering: What happens when everyone discovers the power of aggregators? Will the Web be able to handle it? In Internet boom-speak, will it scale?

Already, aggregators have swamped some sites, slowing Web servers and eating up expensive bandwidth, according to bloggers and other Web publishers. The end may be near, unless something changes soon, said Gary Lawrence Murphy, whose Linux blog, TeledyN, has been overloaded.

“Once all the covered wagons show up and an RSS reader is folded into Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or Outlook, we’re doomed,” Murphy said.

Here’s how it works: Aggregators get their information through feeds that conform to a specification called RSS, short for Really Simple Syndication. The spec breaks up each entry or story on a website by title, description and direct link. In addition, RSS lets website publishers easily swap content with other websites. Wired News uses RSS to send its articles to other sites – My Yahoo, for example.

In addition to enabling websites to exchange headlines and articles, RSS allows aggregators to collate information from thousands of websites at once. The benefit is that a user can scan headlines from literally a thousand sources without hassle.

More: Wired