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Re: [syndication] My.UserLand.Com aggregator turned off



Dave has to be given a lot of credit for spreading the gospel of RSS.

I remember my first exposure to RSS was through userland, and learned all the basic stuff from there, and got directed to many resources.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who was excited by userland and the potentials. So a hearty thanks Dave for all your work.

As we know userland has had trouble keeping up lately with lots of registered feeds not updating. I'm sure it just became too much of a chore to keep it running, especially for what was a free service, and one that cost a lot to run I'm sure. Dave has every right to focus on revenue generating projects such as Radio after so much free service to spreading the gospel of RSS.

I have no doubt that this mission is now being taken up by the hard working volunteers at Syndic8, though of course I believe Syndic8's focus is on development and documenting feeds - an application like the userland latest updated RSS items does not seem within the mission at present. The Whytheville resource I think, has been offering direct access to feeds rather than through userland for 12 months or so, though it is not encouraged for server load reasons I am sure.

We still need a validator, is there any now available? how about on the Syndic8 site?


At 16:20 13-01-02, you wrote:
In article <075301c19bf9$678b29e0$33a1dc40@murphy>, Dave Winer
<dave@userland.com> writes
>Dear Syndicators, today I put the My.UserLand.Com aggregator to rest. It
>served us well, but had fallen behind its decentralized grandchild-- the
>aggregator in Radio UserLand.

All things must pass. But this is quite a shame.

My.Userland has performed a useful set of services to the RSS community,
such as the Validator. There's also code out there that depended on it
such as the Wytheville RSS->Javascript tool[1].

As I've mentioned before, some of the My.Userland functionality could
usefully be rolled into weblogs.com. In particular, producing a list of
recently changed RSS sources with the URL of the RSS instead of the html
representation.

Maybe this is another example of "The end of free". But hopefully some
(or more) of the services provided by my.userland will be picked up by
others such as Syndic8[2]. They've already effectively taken over
responsibility for keeping the directory of all known RSS feeds.

[1]http://www.wcc.vccs.edu/services/news/
[2]http://www.syndic8.com

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