"Narrowcasting" RSS

["judielaine" <jeb@grey-cat.com>]

It seems most of the RSS paradigm leans towards "broadcasting," ie,
the audience of the RSS item is as many folks as possible. I've been
thinking about how useful it might be to make "saved searches" RSS
documents. A user of my search engine could then add the RSS document
of a saved search to the rest of their collection of RSS documents.

The problem is the very personalized nature of the feed. My
understanding of how most RSS aggregators work is that a central
"authority" identifies and adds feeds to a particular interface. Thus
I can't add my "saved search on foo" so that only I can see it. I can
imagine that there's an existence proof that some interface out there
allows the ueser to directly add their own feeds, but what is desired
is that a user of my search engine could add their "saved search on
foo" (and *not* their "saved search on bar") to their favorite
aggregator.

Am I right in my understanding of this problem? I have to admit to a
merely theoretical understanding of RSS with the belief that I
probably use it more often than I know (except for early experiments
with my.netscape).

Thanks,

judith

PS: I was happy to discover, I'm not the only person to want saved
searches available ia RSS: "In the future, I hope to retrieve saved
searches from the popular news engines like World News via RSS feeds
and postings to listservs to which I subscribe. " See
http://www.llrx.com/features/rssforlibrarians.htm