Jambalaya

There's a discussion going on on one of Dave Winer's sites about Robert Scoble's recent lament about a Microsoft marketing employee who had completely missed the point about RSS syndication. It's a no brainer, as far as I'm concerned:

I don't see the problem here. If a site doesn't have an RSS feed, I probably will never visit it again again. Period. If it has, and it interests me, I will add its feed to my aggregator. I track about a hundred sites with varying degrees of enthusiasm (and precisely which hundred changes over time). Some are straight news sites, some are informative, some educational, some opinionated, and so on. I don't read everything: my aggregator allows me to cherry pick (so for goodness sake make your headlines seductive). When I need to know something that my RSS network hasn't told me, I try Google. That's surfing, as far as I'm concerned. Perhaps you think I don't count, but can you really afford to take the risk?

I really can't believe this crap about trace amounts of Sudan-1 in certain foodstuffs being a health hazard. Rats have to be fed tons of this stuff for a few of them to get cancer. There is no evidence of it causing cancer in humans but, sure, its probably a good idea to keep it out of the human food chain if at all possible. However if a touch of it creeps in it doesn't warrant the degree of hysteria we are currently having to suffe: this is the precautionary principle gone mad. Just take the blighters quietly to one side and make sure it doesn't happen again. Anyway, anyone silly enough to eat the kind of junk it is appearing in shouldn't complain.