What is RSS Cloud? With the new mention of RSS Cloud by Matt Mullenweg and Wordpress, everybody is buzzing about the new term RSS Cloud and what it means to the blogosphere. But what really is RSS Cloud and what does it mean to the everyday web guy/girl like you and me?

What is RSS Cloud?

Quickonlinetips.com wrote it best recently in saying that RSS Cloud “promises to push your blog updates to supported RSS aggregators and feed readers instantly and give real time updates”. In more technical detail Techcrunch.com explains that RSS Cloud is a “new format specification for feeds that solves polling and notification issues. It works by adding a <cloud> element to a feed which describes the path to a cloud server that should be notified when a feed is updated. The cloud server, in-turn, will send the updated feed content to all subscribers and aggregators.”

How is this different from what happens now?

Right now when you hit the “publish” button on your new wordpress article, your RSS feed is updated. It does this by pinging various blog tracking services and RSS aggregators. The service commonly known in the Wordpress world for achieving this task is Pingomatic. This system, once “pinged” takes anywhere from 15 to 60 minutes to update throughout the web. RSS Cloud cuts that lag time which is normally 15-60 minutes to literally seconds or for the sake of what I will explain later in this article – Real-Time!

Ok that’s cool and all. But what does that mean to me?

Okay so here is where this gets fun. Now we are talking about Real-Time, full-length blogging. Millions of people interacting in a space of seconds rather than minutes & hours. This means several things. First let’s take a look from a more global perspective. What this means to the Internet as a whole.

1. Right now Wordpress.com tracks over 50,000,000 (50 million) new posts read via RSS every single week! That’s huge! Right now those 50 million posts are read approximately 30 minutes after they are written by the author. RSS Cloud will allow these posts to be read instantaneously. That’s a heck of alot of information being spread at a much much faster pace.
2. This will create more compelling conversations in Real-time. Right now real-time conversations take place in a world like Twitter where you are communicating with one another in 140 characters or less. Blog articles create a more in depth discussion than this does.
3. Other than the social aspect of Twitter, the big question for bloggers will become…”Why don’t I just use my own self-host blog or microblog? It’s real-time too!”

Now that you get what this means to the Internet as a whole. Let’s take a look at what it means to you as a blogger. This is going to take blogging to a completely new level. Here’s why:

1. Could you imagine waiting 15 to 60 minutes for every email that is supposed to end up in your inbox? Of course not. You wouldn’t put up with that. It’s too long of a wait. RSS in many ways is the same situation. It’s just that we have become accustomed to waiting for our new post feeds. Once this is real-time we can increase our learning and information gathering capacities. 
2. Creating a conversation has always been a standard that all bloggers have tried to achieve. It’s the “golden ticket” in the blogging industry. Now that your blogs are updated via RSS in real-time, conversational style posts will become so much more natural to you and to the reader.
3. A self-hosted microblog now makes sense! Before you had use a 3rd party service to ensure that other people could be notified quickly of your message/post. Now with RSS Cloud being instant, your self-hosted Wordpress microblog can do the same thing.

This is kind of the equation that helps me understand the broad overall effects of a Real-Time RSS updating thingy!

Social Production + Real-Time Blogging = Faster & More Innovation

There are 4 things that I think you will see in the coming months due to this new breakout in technology. They are:

1. More Self Hosted Microblogs
2. More advances in the technology of the RSS Feed Reader
3. Lifestreaming integration improving. Basically the ability to sync my Twitter account with my Facebook account.
4. Software collaboration improves. So much of the open source software projects rely on communication via RSS. Imagine how much this will help those guys.

Now let’s get a few facts straight. Currently only the River2 feed reader and the Lazyfeed feed reader supports the RSS Cloud. But many professionals predict that the big readers such as Google Reader and Bloglines will follow suite in the coming weeks/months. But there is a Google Project that has been going on for some time called Pubsubhubbub which strives to achieve the same things. This of course is in practice by the famous Google Reader.

Wordpress + RSS Cloud + Pubsubhubbub = Real-Time Blogging!

That’s the only equation you need to know as the blogger. There are two plugins, one for RSS Cloud and the other for that goofy name Pubsubhubbub. Both plugins will allow you to provide real-time RSS feeds to most of your readers. The rest will follow suit as this whole new RSS Cloud project evolves. Download these plugins and install them and you are good to go!