RE: [syndication] Revisting NNTP?

["Rael Dornfest" <rael@oreilly.com>]

Howdy Bill,

> I've been going over NNTP again.  Maybe I'm just stuck in a mental
> rut or something but tell me again why we're not using NNTP for these
> feeds?

I see your rut and raise you... I've been fiddling with this a little on a
laptop NNTP install and really like where it could go, but just haven't had
the bandwidth to spend time on it.  I've been toying with using an alt.rss.*
hierarchy with one feed per group and >= 1 item per posting.

The issues I see immediately are spam and spoofing.  Now this could be
averted using authenticated postings only on participating servers.  But
there's something a little icky about that, both in terms of concept and
execution.

> What about this idea, we create one newsgroup for each feed.  Then
> push each item into it's own message.  Have the message contain
> whatever human readable info was present in the item AND attach some
> nuggets of XML to it.

I'd prefer just pushing the XML to allow for some implicit assumptions about
what you're getting.  If you wanted human-readable counterparts, I'd
recommend alt.rss.*.text, but that should definitely be optional.

> No, this wouldn't work given the current UseNet 'push it all around'
> structure because we'd be creating new groups left and right.

Actually, if posting to said group of NNTP servers were authenticated and
hooked to some form of RSS channel registry like Backend.Userland.com or
xmlTree.com, this could indeed be manageable.

> However, if the feeds were concentrated at some known sources it
> might be OK.  We're not talking the gobs of crap that's already going
> round in usenet; just news headlines and some limited bits of XML.

Whatever RSS can carry would be my vote.

Rael