Re: [syndication] RSS 0.91 - skips & optional stuff

[Dan Lyke <danlyke@flutterby.com>]

On Mon, 12 Jun 2000, Dave Winer wrote:
> I don't understand. Do you have an example? Dave

Dave Winer was referring to David Galbraith's comment that:
> > The problem with aggregating using RSS at the moment is that if
> > you pull together a list of related items from different sources
> >  then the aggregator appears to be the source.

I think the issue here is that many of us webloggers saw RSS as an
additional way to publish our weblogs. So, for instance, on my RSS feed at
http://www.flutterby.com/main.rdf I insert an entry for my main page with
a last updated time in the title, all the local rants currently on the
main page (none right now), then fill up the remaining entries with the
tags from my page.

If Moreover is grabbing a couple of different RSS feeds and further
integrating them, perhaps in some custom feed that puts the Flutterby and
Scripting News RSS files into yet another file that it feeds to the end
customer, there's no audit trail for how those records got into that final
file (Most of us bloggers do it in our HTML versions with "Via xyz" sort
of link).

I think the answer is that RSS really isn't a format for publishing
weblogs in, that in being essentially a flat-file database with a little
meta information at the top rather than a markup, it's really meant to be
a "I have these files available" rather than a "here's the cool stuff you
should see" format.

So it seems that the thing for me to do most inline with the philosophy of
RSS (and I've only had enough feedback from those who use my RSS files to
know that they're being used, not how) would be to cut any links out of it
that aren't to content that's either hosted on Flutterby or by me.

Dan