RE: [syndication] Re: Aggregating and displaying feeds

[dave.cantrell@gunter.af.mil]

>Let's say I see an interesting author pop up referenced via a rarely-
>read feed.  I might want to wander over into the feed to see what 
>else is happening.  This is a pain in the ass with most current 
>readers.  Not that they're defective, just lacking this ability.  
>They're close; tantalizingly so, but not quite there (yet).

Ok. Just looking over this, it seems to me (on the surface at least) that
this should be a SMOP.

Take RSS 0.91 for instance: You have a <title>, <link>, and <managingEditor>
element. If you dump all contents to a relational database and key all items
off the <title> and <link> elements as a combined primary key, then you
could do lookups all day long. Take the P2P "aggregate" feed as an example:
if you find an <item> by an author (<managingEditor>?) that interests you in
the P2P feed, that author could be a link to more information on their feeds
(i.e. what feed(s) they write, what feed(s) they are mentioned in, etc) and
from there you could just navigate away (to another feed, a specific item,
etc).

To me the trickier part would be getting the data into the database -- while
easy enough, it's something I've never actually worked on before, so I'd
have to do it from scratch.

Is this what you're talking about, or am I missing something here?

Seems to me this could be made a lot easier with an optional <author>
element attached to each <item> -- then you could for instance better model
something like Slashdot, where the <managingEditor> may or may not be the
<author> for one or more <item> elements. This would allow you to extract
based on the <author> and be better able to track the writings of that one
individual, and they could even be an <author> in one place and a
<managingEditor> in another.

Of course that would defeat the whole purpose of using the existing
standards. Still, it seems there are two different models out there for
these types of items: the standard weblog, where one person
(<managingEditor>) writes each item (a la Scripting.com); and the
"community" weblogs like Slashdot, where many people each write one item,
and one of them may or may not be the <managingEditor> for the channel.

Is there already a standard in place for something like this? I don't want
to re-hash the thread on the reallySimpleSyndication group (headline
syndication vs story syndication) but would like to know if a format such as
RSS 0.91 can actually handle this type of syndication.

Thanks,
-dave

________________________________________________________
 SSgt Dave Cantrell, USAF
 Web Developer, Logistics Information Systems
 [DSN] 596.6277  [COM] 334.416.6277
 dave.cantrell@gunter.af.mil
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