Re: [syndication] (Random Thoughts) Content syndication and content "cleansing"

["DJ Adams" <dj.adams@gmx.net>]

----- Original Message -----
From: Carmen <chv@vertexdev.com>
> Longer term, I do think that encouraging sites to export
> headlines and summaries via RSS is the way to go. The RSS
> file is itself a form of an ad come-on. The sites go to
> the trouble of generating it and making it available with
> the hope that the headlines will be sufficiently interesting
> to draw you to your site.

I think this is a key point - rather than have the battle (with the content
owner) and the pain (of parsing a moving HTML target) of scraping, RSS is an
up-front cards-on-the-table way of dealing with both ends of the issue.
Perhaps sites that don't offer machine parsable data (RSS for example,
although suddenly DeepLeap comes to mind even though I haven't played with
it yet) will eventually lose out visitor-wise to those that do. That would
be nice ;-)

I think the coming Web generation is very meta (go GEB!) - first came
hypertext, then came multimedia, now comes introspection and organisation.
Metadata is great for coders like me who like playing with web technology
but are rubbish at design and content ;o)

dj