Re: [syndication] "Narrowcasting" RSS

["Mark Nottingham" <mnot@mnot.net>]

Very much so. I'd think that this is a good marriage of REST and RSS; a
search engine might have a URI for a set of search results that looks like
  http://search.example.com/query?term=foo&term=bar
which returns text/html by default. To get the RSS feed, one GETs

http://search.example.com/query?term=foo&term=bar&type=application/rss+xml
or similar.

On a related note, one of the things that I'd like to see is RSS to be
offered as a more dynamic, customizable feed in other contexts as well.
For example. Slashdot allows users to customise what categories they see,
but the RSS feed is just a firehose of whatever's published. RSS is just
another format that's more machine-digestable than HTML; when the content
is list-based, it should be available in both representations.

Cheers,

----- Original Message -----
From: "judielaine" <jeb@grey-cat.com>
To: <syndication@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 13, 2002 1:39 PM
Subject: [syndication] "Narrowcasting" RSS


> 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
>
>
>
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>
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