RE: [syndication] Re: [radio-userland] Payloads for RSS

["Jeff Barr" <jeff@vertexdev.com>]

I also like the payload idea. I was just thinking that
it might be an interesting email format too, since
it would avoid the problem of overly large enclosures.

I think the expectation here is that the client program
(the one reading the RSS) would either make some decisions
or ask the user to make decisions about how to proceed.
Dave has thoughtfully provided the type and size
information needed to make this possible.

For example, it could have rules such as "Download all
movies each night", or "Play Sound Files Immediately",
or "Wait until late at night to download anything
bigger than 1 MB". Or, even more cleverly, "Download
any movies where the referenced document includes the
string 'George Bush'". That could be kind of cool.

I would not expect the client to, by default, "deference
all of the pointers" and bring down everything.

Note that this client could be a kind of Active Napster,
accumulating interesting chunks of out of band content
as references to them stream by.

Classification seems nice in theory, but remember that
each additional piece of information that we add into
RSS will make the format more complicated and harder to
use, while also bloating the file. A great attribute
of RSS is that it is clean, simple, and very easy to
produce. I was talking to a VP at the Wall St. Journal
yesterday, and she told me that a lot of the value
that they add to their syndicated content is in the form
of tags for geographic location and stock tickers. They
employ editors who do this and nothing else. Most people
shipping out RSS are not going to have the wherewithal
to do this.

Jeff;

-----Original Message-----
From: David Davies [mailto:d.a.davies@bham.ac.uk]
Sent: Thursday, January 11, 2001 5:55 PM
To: radio-userland@egroups.com
Cc: decentralization@egroups.com; syndication@egroups.com
Subject: [syndication] Re: [radio-userland] Payloads for RSS


I think this is a truly inspired addition to RSS and will help us in our use
of syndicated data no end. I can't wait to get going with it.

One thought though. I can imagine a danger of super-bloat with the enclosure
field in regular RSS channels. Suppose I subscribe to a hypothetical CNN
sports news channel and with this new enclosure element all its sports
stories come with a video clip of a sports game. Maybe I'm only interested
in following one team let alone one sport yet when I wake up in the morning
I find my personal aggregator (e.g. MyUserland on the Desktop) has
downloaded megabytes (tens, hundreds, more?) of videos of stuff I'm just not
interested in. Wow, there goes my hard disk.

What's the answer? More specific RSS channels?

On the radio-UserLand list we talked a little about further refinement of a
channel's data using a category or keyword element.

This is a difficult area because of standardisation of keyword
classification systems. At one level (e.g. some professional areas) there
are many standard classification systems in operation. In my own field of
medicine we have an international keyword system making highly specific data
syndication a lot easier. Granted, there is a lack of standardisation in
other areas though there are pointers such as Library of Congress or the
Dewey decimal system. There will always be other areas (personal weblogs
with automatic syndication are a good example) where no classification
system is ever going to emerge though maybe with these channels by
definition they're more focussed so you may not mind or even get lots of
unwanted enclosure elements.

This isn't a criticism, I think enclosures are a major leap forward, for me
and our application of RSS at least. Just trying to keep the discussion
moving forward.

Cheers,

David