Re: [syndication] Re: Proposal RSSFAQ Group

[Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>]

On Thu, May 31, 2001 at 04:55:23AM +0100, Alis Marsden wrote:
> 
> OK, it is not purely technical but I personally find it quite
> technical most of the time.  Unless other people come out and say
> they would prefer a place that was less technical, I'll assume I'm
> a minority.

Well, it's supposed to be general syndication discussion, which has
mostly drawn technical people, because for a long time they were the
only people both able to realize the benefits of syndication, and
able to do something about it.

It definately isn't a development list; it is an idea-for-development
list. I would very much encourage an evangelization effort to use
the list, if the people involved want to. Hopefully, the people
involved will be a significant portion of the population here.

RE: RSSFAQ in general - this is a great start, but IMHO we need more
than a FAQ (although Alis' doc is an *excellent* start - nice and
simple, to the point). My on-the-back-of-a-napkin approach would be
(probably as a number of documents, all on RSSFAQ, if Alis is
amenable):

- Syndication high-level introduction / executive summary
  (sell syndication to the boss)
- Syndication for content producers
  - why syndicate? (it'll help, not hurt your site)
  - Syndication format overview
  - choosing a Syndication format
  - syndication helper tools
  - common mistakes in creating a syndication feed
- Syndication for end users
  - syndication clients
- Syndication for developers
  - how to use a syndication feed
  - syndication libraries, toolkits, etc.
  - common mistakes in parsing a syndication feed

I.e., split up the content and target it at different audiences. I'm
not saying we should do all of this now, it's just an idea of one
place we might end up.

Hmm, if we change the names away from RSS, we should probably
name the domain something neutral...

Alis, if you need somewhere to host DNS and/or Web, I'd be happy to
help.


-- 
Mark Nottingham
http://www.mnot.net/