Today my trusty office computer - a relaible companion for so many months - was KO'd by a nasty virus. The entire hard drive needs to be reformatted and all my favorite apps - FeedDemon, ActiveWords, Firefox, OneNote and WeatherBug - all need to be restored tomorrow, robbing me of precious time to blog, er, I mean "be productive." Of course, this all hits just as I need to get ready to participate in this week's BlogOn conference.
Luckily, I had backed up all my data as well as my feeds into several OPML files. I uploaded my feeds to Bloglines and I was able to find this gem of a story. Apparently, some publishers are having trouble coping with the demands placed on their servers by RSS news readers.
The popularity of RSS feeds is testing the web infrastructure of at least one publisher, which likens the impact of newsreader traffic to a denial of service (DoS) attack.
Despite the influence of prominent RSS evangelists, there is a small, but growing faction of pundits out there who are beginning to worry out loud about the demands that RSS pings place on servers. My technological debacle today is also making me wonder: how long will it be until we hear about the first virus introduced into the wild via RSS link and/or enclosure, and might it threaten adoption? I'm not saying RSS caused my virus incident, but I wonder if this might happen one day soon. I sure hope not. (Please correct me if this is not technically possible).
Food for thought as I spend a few hours with CD installs.
