Browser Linkage, Ratings, and Categories...

[Morbus Iff <morbus@disobey.com>]

1. Browser Linkage

We've had a lot of different suggestions so far about MIME Types, and HEAD
tags, and all that fun stuff. I'm not sure I agree with any of them - they
become too complicated for everyone involved. HEAD tags must hit
Javascripts, MIME types we've got to teach our server about, blah blah.

Why not just use do what a lot of other programs are already doing? We've
got napster://, we've got hotline://, why not just add a rss://? Then it's
a matter of two things:

 1) Much like the webmaster already creates links like mailto:,
    http:, and ftp:, it's only a matter of creating a new link
    that starts off with rss://.

 2) Much like Napster and Hotline listen to napster:// and
    hotline://, our specific aggregator just listens to rss://.

It's a lot simpler, and we're pushing the brunt onto the client program -
the client program sets the mapping for the browser. The client program
figures out what to do with it, and so on and so forth.


2. Ratings

I still haven't heard a scheme that I like yet. And to be honest, I don't
have one myself. My main fears have already been echoed: too many
dictators, and click-click-click-whoo-i'm-soooper-popular!

One guy (sorry anonymous guy, I've already deleted your message) mentioned
that we should track the number of times a channel has been subscribed too.
I like this idea, personally - Radio Userland on the Desktop already does
this with their Hotlist.

The "rating" is determined by how many people think it's good enough to
keep reading it. Of course, then you have remotely skewed ratings, which
you can already see in RUOTD - The Dictionary.com Word of the Day is the
"most popular", although that's probably related to it's quickness of
reading, and not to the strength of its content.

The problem with tracking is to make it universal, we'd have to obviously
have one tracking station that we all submitted to. And each time one of
our users unsubscribed, we'd have to send a magical "$rss--" to the server.
After a while, understanding so many clients, or clients that may be
broken, our ratings would be skewed out of erosion, not out of
maliciousness.


3. Categories

I'm dead set against these. It's so impossibly hard to categorize a site
nowadays, that we'll only get into arguments about where this should go,
and why this isn't in this one, and blah blah blah. It gets even worse the
more cooks are added to the flame.

If categories *need* to be done, I'd recommend us not doing them at all.
Use Yahoo or Dmoz as a model - find out where our syndicating site sits in
there, and then just stick our rss in that category too. Not only will this
meet user's search expectations, but it gets us back to becoming creators
of syndication programs and not to editorializing.


Long email. No coffee. Sorry.

-- 
Morbus Iff
                  Here we have One DimensionalMorbus - Flatter than
   _____       Brooke Shields, able to to be ignored for days at a time,
               slower than a Microsoft Slug. Defender of AOL users, Bill
                Gates and other one dimensional life forms who mutter
                                  "I don't get it..."

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