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Re: [syndication] Question: discovering sources

At 01:32 PM 10/12/00 -0700, Dave Winer wrote:

>>Meerkat gets its list of feeds from, amongst other smaller registries,
xmlTree and My.Userland.

I been wondering about that. How much did you get from our open-ness, vs
xmlTree, and what are the smaller ones.
When I checked both, I found that there was much overlap. However, both systems of organizations have their problems.
First of all, XML tree does more than XML. It also lists WAP feeds which, as far as I know, are NOT XML compliant. That greatly bothered me as there is no great way to search only on RSS or RDF feeds.
In terms of My.userland, I liked the fact that you are listing the sources and limiting it to RSS. However, it could use some sort of categorization scheme, which might make it easier to use.
I do, however, appreciate the openness of both those directories compared to the closed approach that Netscape is taking. 


Since you benefited from our generosity, it seems fair that you disclose
your sources as well. Perhaps I missed that.


Here are the ones I got:

.91 feeds:

News.com
http://internetalchemy.org/channels/rss/cnet-news.xml
CNN
http://www.cnn.com/cnn.rss
MacWeek
http://www.macweek.com/macweek.xml

1.0 feeds:
Wired
http://www.wired.com/news_drop/netcenter/netcenter.rdf
WebMonkey
http://www.hotwired.com/webmonkey/meta/headlines.rdf
Salon
http://www.salon.com/feed/RDF/salon_use.rdf
Internetnews.com
http://headlines.internet.com/internetnews/top-news/news.rss
Forbes
http://internetalchemy.org/channels/rss/forbes.xml


Other (non-RSS compliant) XML data feeds:
Scripting.com
http://scriptingnews.userland.com/xml/scriptingnews2.xml
Slashdot
http://slashdot.org/slashdot.xml
Now, you may wonder why I would go about grabbing so many feeds. Well, to put it quite simply, because I want to have access to quick news from my cell phone and I didn't like all the extra clutter the wap version of some of those feeds (some of them don't even exist on WAP). So I created a set of scripts that allow me to parse the RSS feed and convert them in HDML and WML (see source code and details at http://www.tnl.net/how/asp/RSS ). I'm now trying to figure out a way to standardize that grabbing of feeds so that someone could enter a subject on their WAP phone and immediately, the relevant stories would be pushed to the phone. However, I have had difficulties locating primary sources...
The other reason behind this is that I'm trying to establish the state of RSS. All of us on this list are aware that there are quite a few RSS feeds out there but the basic question is how many of the top sites out there actually do RSS. And how does it break down (are people adopting 1.0? Are they sticking with .91? Are they going with their own version?)
Based on what I've found, it seems that there is some need on our part to evangelize RSS. Few old media sites are actually doing RSS feeds and fewer are publicizing them. For RSS to succeed, the process needs to be open to all and I appreciate the work done by My.userland and XMLtree in terms of offering directories.
Expanding beyond RSS, I am looking at XML sourcing on the web. In order to fully understand the spread of XML, we need to know where and where it's going. Don't you find it interesting that everyone is talking about a semantic web (from Tim Berners-Lee to the RDF crowd) but it seems that XML sources are not as widely available as HTML ones (I can use any search engine to find an HTML document on the web. I have yet to find a search engine that does the same for XML).
My fear is that XML is increasingly becoming about the closing up of the web (hide the sources and lock out the others) instead of the kind of opened and interlinked web that was promised. 

TNL
Tristan Louis | Home: tristan@tnl.net | 140 e. 28th st. | | Chairman and CEO | http://www.tnl.net | Suite 8C | 
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