Re: [syndication] OCS Version 0.5 draft

[burton@openprivacy.org]

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Ian Davis <iand@internetalchemy.org> writes:

> On Thursday, 05 September 2002 at 03:18, burton@openprivacy.org wrote:
> > I can't help but think that the concept of an RSS feed is obsolete:
> I assume you meant to write OCS here?

yes. sorry.
<snip/>


> > 3.  We now have the mod_subscription spec [1] which can be used by RSS
> >     readers/aggregators to discover other RSS channels and with the mod_link
> >     spec one can link to additional RDF.

> I'm not sure i really understand the purpose of the subscription module in the
> context of an RSS channel. The examples don't make it clear whether this is
> some kind of recommendation system or whether the container rss channel is the
> aggregate of the two subscriptions listed (wired, peerfear).

" There are two main roles for this module. When mod_subscription is used from
  within a personal weblog these are essentially user subscriptions. When
  syndicated from a corporate (professional) site such as CNN, CNET, etc, these
  essentially form recommendations of external sites (further reading or
  affiliate links)."

 -- mod_subscription spec

> > Put these things together and it doesn't make sense to lug around OCS.
>
> Since OCS is RDF also you could use your modules in your OCS file to add
> additional functionality such as vendor subscription urls (although I guess
> these are pretty fragile since a vendor may choose to change their API at any
> time breaking hundreds of subscription lists, perhaps it would be better for
> them to publish an RDF file specifying how to build the subscription url for a
> particular type of channel)

I guess my major objection isn't in the use of OCS as a format.  It is very
similar in representation with mod_subscription so that can't be a bad thing.

My object is the use of OCS as an RSS inter-discovery mechanism between nodes.

Reptile supports OCS but as we see more-and-more adoption of RSS we are going to
see the downloading of whole OCS feeds as overkill.  Right now syndic8 has 11k
feeds and I just see this getting bigger and bigger.

What I really want mod_subscription to be used for is for P2P style discovery
(potentially using trust metrics but that is another story) between RSS readers
and aggregators.

Instead of using syndic8 (or another provider) to fetch a 400G OCS file we would
use our 'subscriptions' to discovery other RSS feeds.

This scales very well.  RSS weblog communities can be used to keep the signal to
noise ratio very high.  The chance that a necessary feed is going to be N (where
N < 4) degrees from the current node is very good.

If this is the intent of OCS than I am +1.  If not then I still want to push
mod_subscription forward as I really want to keep the RSS channel discovery
mechanism function in a P2P manner..

Kevin

- -- 
Kevin A. Burton ( burton@apache.org, burton@openprivacy.org, burton@peerfear.org )
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