Ever since Henry Ford told his customers they could have “any color so long as it’s black,” our consumer society has been driven by the vision and goals of just a few creators. But in the 1990s, the emergence of the worldwide Web led to the explosive popularization of the Internet, and it became clear that the one-way flow of ideas upon which the consumer society was based would soon be a memory. The ubiquity of the Internet is now thrusting us headlong into a new age, where the flow of ideas changes from one-way to many-way, and the key to society becomes participation instead of just consumption.

It was in that context that a few colleagues and I started the web site blogs.sun.com for Sun Microsystems. We could see that in a “participation age,” a key to the company’s success would be providing the means for Sun’s staff to directly engage with the technology and customer communities in which they were participating. All over the world, in every corner of human interest, others have been coming to the same conclusion, and today blogs are proliferating as fast as web sites did in the early 1990s.

With these blogs, almost incidentally, comes another technology that may have an even greater effect on society: the syndication feed, a computer-readable list of blog contents. Used today by blog reader programs and by aggregators (such as the BlogLines web site [http://www.bloglines.com] or the Planet Roller aggregator [http://www.rollerweblogger.org], with which I build my summary blog “The Daily Mink” [http://www.webmink.net]), syndication feeds allow innovative repurposing of the content of blogs and open up new avenues for content sharing, such as podcasting. Although use of syndication feeds is in its infancy, I predict big things, as the ability to create and consume them gets built into the operating systems we use on computers and mobile devices.

It may seem simple, but the syndication feed, in whatever format it’s found—RSS or Atom—is an important step in the evolution of the system at the heart of the Web, XML. The original authors of XML saw it as a universal document language, allowing a tree-structured representation of a document. Syndication feeds bring another powerful structure to XML—lists and collections.

Lists and collections (such as databases) are at the core of so much of computing already, and syndication feeds provide a means for programs to share data organically. They provide an avenue for easy SOA (service-oriented architectures) and unlock imaginative use of all the data that swirls around us—bank accounts, health records, billing information, travel histories, and so much more. Syndication feeds make the Web programmable. More than that, Atom standardizes the means by which feeds are accessed, providing an API to decouple the web site from the program that exploits its feeds.

A wave of people, the “Web 2.0” movement, is already using syndication feeds and Ajax to create web sites such as Flickr, del.icio.us, Bloglines, and Technorati, and they’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible.

This book is an important reference for people who want to be ready for the future. You may have picked it up for information about the technology side of blogging, but it offers much more than that. It’s a launch pad for the future. Pioneers like Tim Bray, Sam Ruby, Dave Winer, and Mark Pilgrim had to make all this up as they went along.

For you, there’s this book. The skills it teaches you may prove to be the key that unlocks a participation-age program that will change the world. Read on, program wisely, and create the future!

Simon Phipps
Chief Open Source Officer
Sun Microsystems, Inc.