Re: [syndication] RE: [RSS-DEV] Cross-Site Unique ID Formats? And ID Debating...

["Dave Winer" <dave@userland.com>]

Jeff, I think the Hotlist feature in Radio UserLand is going to turn out to
be a way of spreading the work around among a lot of users without very much
centralizing. The channels that rise to the top are the ones that are good.
If there are two versions in popular use that will show up too. We only have
about 20 people using it now, but it's doing a good job of showing us where
the good stuff is. Dave


----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeff Barr" <jeff@vertexdev.com>
To: <rss-dev@yahoogroups.com>; <syndication@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 10:26 PM
Subject: [syndication] RE: [RSS-DEV] Cross-Site Unique ID Formats? And ID
Debating...


> Wow, I get on a plane for a few hours and lots happens :-).
>
> Ideally, I would like the IDs to be unique across time and space, like
> a Microsoft COM GUID. These are 128 bits long and are, as the docs say,
> "unique to a high degree of certainty." It would be cool if this
> was included somewhere within the RSS <channel> tag, and if there was
> a web service that the site author would use to assign it.
>
> However, I do not think that there is a totally automated way to make
> sure that the same (leaving out the definition of "same" for the moment)
> GUID is assigned to different URLs that are aliases to the same info.
> Human judgement is needed to look at the info contained and pointed
> to by two or more candidate URLs and to decide if they are the same or
> not. So this service would have to have the ability to say "I'll get
> back to you on that."
>
> For a moment I thought that a SOAP service that accepted a candidate
> URL, checked it against a master list, then either returned an existing
> GUID or created and then returned a new one. But this takes the human
> judgement out of the loop and then we end up needing an alias list again
> to say that "these two GUIDs are the same."
>
> For me, this all starts and ends as a quality of service issue. I want
> to give my users a unique list of content. If they are regular readers
> of, say, "CNET", and they've done some customization to that channel
> within my program, then I don't want them to be confused if the source
> of that channel changes, say, from scraped data (once available from
> the late Internet Alchemy) to Moreover data, to what could at sometime
> become a direct feed. I've actually got lots of stuff in the works on
> the customization front (none of which I want to talk about yet), and
> it is possible that a user could productively spend 10 or 15 minutes
> on customization. The unique ID is what allows me to do this, and to
> not have them lose their work when the data source or the source's
> name changes. I cannot index the contributions by "CNET", and I cannot
> index them to the URL which is supplying the content. Neither is truly
> fixed.
>
> I never defined "same" before. This is where things get hairy. For the
> work I am doing, I look at the content returned and make a judgement
> call. Identical content is two different formats (e.g. <rss> and
<moreover>)
> is the same. Different human languages (English vs. French) are not.
> Parameterized URLs which specify different item counts to return are
> the same. I make this call from the user's point of view.
>
> Jeff;
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Morbus Iff [mailto:morbus@disobey.com]
> Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 7:13 PM
> To: rss-dev@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: RE: [RSS-DEV] Cross-Site Unique ID Formats? And ID Debating...
>
>
> >Right - all I meant is that the creator of an xml channel either in terms
> of
> >an aggregated topic from multiple sources (in which case a third party) a
> >channel of commentary (weblog style) or an original source (in which case
> >the ID should relate to the original publisher via a namespace or
someother
> >and not the third party who may be creating the xml channel) should not
> >necessarily be who the namespace relates to. This way you do not get
> >duplicates and can just use a namespace without a timestamp.
>
> I don't think I'm understannding then - "the creator of an xml channel"?
> So, we'd be forcing the end user to decide a id for themselves?
> How do you feel about the "xmlUrl as unique id" idea?
>
> --
> 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..."
>
> -03--- <\/> ---- <http://www.disobey.com/> --- Bad Ascii, Short
Notice ----
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