RE: [syndication] An Open Letter of Mindless Blathering

[dave.cantrell@gunter.af.mil]

>Beautiful piece Morbus [...]

Agreed. Very thoughtful posting, and excellent insight. :)

>1. Make it easy for your users to publish their subscription lists.

Hmm, that idea sounds familiar...

Earlier this morning I spent a few minutes checking out NewsIsFree, and I
must say I'm impressed. I especially like the URL-based interface (a la
Rael's Meerkat API) and ability to combine feeds -- very cool!

One idea that immediately jumped out at me as I was browsing went like this:
Allow users to publish their subscription lists, and also allow users to
manage "trusted users", e.g. lists of users whose judgement they trust, and
can hook into their list of feeds, etc.

See, I said it sounded familiar! ;)

Webshots [1] does this very well, and is actually the first place I can
recall encountering it. You can upload your own photos to the system, and
search against their metadata (title, subject, etc I guess -- probably
nothing really formal like Dublin Core) to see results. For instance, I can
search on "military aircraft" and get a list of maybe 50 photos of military
aircraft back. I can download each of these into my Webshots client and set
them as rotating wallpaper. I can also add each of the users who uploaded
military aircraft photos to my "trusted users" list ("buddy list"?) and
check periodically to see if they added anything.

I don't know that they offer any capabilities beyond that, but it's a pretty
cool feature. I think epinions.com and Amazon have similar capabilities too.

>2. Make it easy for everyone to find an aggregation of those lists, ranked
>by popularity. This tends to make the bad or dead channels fall to the
>bottom, off the list.

I have to disagree with you on this point. While it may be great for finding
weblogs, this sort of capability would not help me at all. One of the
features I like about Moreover is the ability to syndicate searches across
all channels. I've set up four channels in my aggregator, one each for U.S.
Air Force [2], U.S. Army [3], U.S. Navy [4], and U.S. Marine Corps [5]. Each
of these is a syndicated search on Moreover. This is helpful to see
information that specifically relates to these branches of service. These
channels may not always be updated daily, and may not necessarily be updated
even weekly. Thus, they would tend to fall to the bottom of your listing and
eventually fall off. But they serve a valid purpose to us, and therefore
would remain high on our list.

Your idea of a centralized channel listing ranked by popularity is great,
but you seem to focus on blogging over other uses. This is fine since this
is your area, and you do a good job of promoting that capability, but it is
only one of the many uses of RSS.

If you built the de facto standard channel, and it was biased towards
bloggers, where would the rest of us turn for "utility" feeds (e.g.
syndicated searches, Yahoo Groups syndication, etc) that may not be updated
as often as say "Joe's House of Death" weblog?

That would seem to call for creating competing listings, which can be both
good (competition is good) and bad (potentially confusing). I generally lean
towards the competition standpoint in the vast majority of cases, but I
worry that your focus on weblogging can/will drown out other innovative
uses.

These innovative uses are why I personally like RSS 1.0. Its modular nature
allows for all of these flexible capabilities.

Note this is not a dig against 0.9[n], just stating a personal preference.

-dave

[1] http://www.webshots.com
[2]
http://www.moreover.com/cgi-local/page?o=rss&h=Search+results+for...+U.S.+Ai
r+Force&query=U.S.+Air+Force
[3]
http://www.moreover.com/cgi-local/page?o=rss&h=Search+results+for...+U.S.+Ai
r+Force&query=U.S.+Army
[4]
http://www.moreover.com/cgi-local/page?o=rss&h=Search+results+for...+U.S.+Ai
r+Force&query=U.S.+Navy
[5]
http://www.moreover.com/cgi-local/page?o=rss&h=Search+results+for...+U.S.+Ai
r+Force&query=U.S.+Marine