Re: [syndication] Automatically Transforming Blog or HTML Content into XML

[elijah wright <elw@stderr.org>]

> > LJ also doesn't call itself a 'blog', and there are significant #s of
> > genre features that tend to make people think that their "journals"
> > might be something different than "blogs".
> >
> > these are pretty important distinctions...
>
> Important to who?

pretty important to me, and to other people who have to make defensible
explanations of just what the hell the set of features are that make
something a "blog".  the developer community isn't doing this.


> To a developer flogging their divine vision of what a weblog "is"?

I'm assuming that you're talking about Dave, though in a slant-rhyme sort
of way.  I agree that what he's doing is 'evangelism' rather than
'research', but I also think that what he's doing (with his "what is a
weblog" page) provides a layer of "description-for-newbies" that SOMEONE
has to do.


> Sure, then it's possible to call all sorts of things "not blogs".  But
> fundamentally the majority of "things thought of as weblogs" are largely
> little more than good old fashioned 'personal websites' dressed up
> behind some nice content handling tools.

this is certainly one valid definition, but there are others.  one of the
concerns that i have is that, by calling too many things "blogs", the
community of users and developers gets confused about just what they ought
to be trying to do with tools.  "blogs" are not just one thing to all
people - there are shades of gray, rather than just "blog and not-blog".
some tools have more blog-like features than others, and some tools have
features that are inherited from weblogs but are NOT THEMSELVES BLOGS.


> > yeah.  semantics are important here - a high % of blog tools used
> > (counting users, not tools) don't do RSS, but a high % of blog tools
> > (counting % of all tools, not of all users) *do* do RSS.
>
> I *strongly* disagree with the idea that "a high percentage of blog tools used
> don't do RSS".  That's fundamentally just not correct.


please go back and read the above quoted material again, and parse it, and
see if you can figure out why i'm saying what i'm saying.  you're
half-right.  look at the parentheticals.

points to look for:

* a high percentage of blog tool users are using Blogger
* blogger doesn't support rss natively
* therefore, a high percentage of bloggers don't have access to RSS

* of tools in use, a high percentage of them do provide RSS
* not as many people are using the high percentage of tools that do
	provide RSS


> But we're debating a point here without having an accurate list of what's being
> considered a "blog tool".

sure.  and we can't go there without having a def'n of what a blog is.
once you have that, you can define blog tools as the set of all things
that can be used to build blogs.  ;)



> From what I've seen that staggering majority of tools that work with
> "things vaguely considered as weblogs" DO have RSS features built right
> into them. There are /some/ that don't enable this feature by default.

i agree with what you're saying.  a high percentage of tools, used by a
very small (compared to the total) percentage of users.



> So unless there's a list somewhere that delineates what is or isn't this
> list of tools, and that it's been authoritatively confirmed that they do
> or don't support RSS then I really can't support your assertions about
> percentages.  I'm prepared to be corrected but remain skeptical that
> such will turn out to be the case.

there's the one for rss tools on syndic8... though someone should probably
take that list and supplement it with a list of tools that are in the same
space but do NOT do rss...  i guess this isn't really a problem for this
list, though.


> > it has been fun ;)  nice to confirm some gossip from the larger
> > community, while disproving other bits...
>
> Likewise, we're seen a fair number of articles discussing RSS.  A great
> many of them have, thus far, been fundamentally flawed.  They were all
> written with the best of intentions, of course, but usually lacked some
> key bits of background. Fortunately the authors have all been quick to
> engage in debate and have amended their materials as a result.  Not to
> everyone's satisfaction of course.

thankfully.  we need more articles that address this space.


one of the Big Problems is that there are a whole bunch of perspectives
involved in the RSS community, and in aggregation/syndication in general.
it is impossible to write an article that addresses all points of view
without getting flamed by people who think you should have included their
POV, which is of course superior to all others.  people are jerks.


> I'm not saying "your're wrong" more that the perspective you're
> espousing doesn't parallel mine and, from my experience, doesn't match
> that of conditions in the field.

i think we agree more than you're thinking we do.

thank you for responding.


elijah