State of unique IDs on newsfeed items?

["Bill Kearney" <wkearney99@hotmail.com>]

Hi all,

What's the current state of putting unique IDs on newsfeed items?  
Has there been a consensus on this or any works started?

It would be great to have a unique ID on each item coming out of a 
newsfeed.  The feed formats don't really support this (yet) but bear 
with me.

Great for several reasons.  One being it would allow anyone 
forwarding an item to perhaps retain the original ID.   If the feed 
is going to include a unique ID, it would be very helpful to have 
that number be used in retrieving the item at a later time.  Again, 
there's no standard on this but ISTM that it's worth discussing.

And if a feed had a way to get back to the orignal item, how about 
being able to extract that item in an XML form?  This could go a long 
way toward expanding meta-data use.  While a feed might on show the 
HTML text, the ID pointing back to the original XML data might allow 
some really cool ways to traverse from the original item to similar 
items or (my favorite) categories.

How about it?

It seems there's a tremendous number of feeds being generated by a 
relatively small number of toolkits.  The www.syndic8.com feed list 
is showing a number of new and revealing things about them (and some 
errors).  

Perhaps now is a good time to have a discussion on taking feeds to 
another level?

-Bill Kearney