Re: [syndication] An Open Letter of Mindless Blathering

[Mike Krus <mkrus@newsisfree.com>]

Hi,

I've waited a bit before posting, partly to see what other
people had to say, but mostly 'cause I had real work to do
(also had supper, did the washing up, put the kids to bed ;-)

First, I share the opinion about the nice piece of writting
you did (and others in reply)!

The idea of having a centralized list is indeed nice but
I'm not sure how it could be managed. As you saw yourself,
keeping it clean is a hell of a job (keeping HTML scrappers
working is even worse ;-)). Maybe a collaborative effort,
à la DMOZ, might be the way to go...

Also, it would be hard to agree on categories for each file,
but it would be nice to all have the same.


The idea of using user behaviour to bring out interresting
feeds is even nicer! Obviously we (NewsIsFree) can gather
and publish data about how the users (at least those who
actually use the site, not just the RSS exports):
- what they subscribed to
- what other sources people use with such and such source
- what items they send by mail (more relevant than just
  clicking)
- what items they select for republishing (ie build fields
  on NewsIsFree by selecting items, Radio Userland but on
  a web site, not the desktop).
- how often channels are exported, not much else data to
  gather there. This might change once we have support
  for the "cloud", i.e. registering for updated...

This of course is things we can do, but some background on
us: NewsIsFree is our hoby, both Pino and I have "real" jobs.
NewsIsFree currently has very little operating costs (hosting
is gracefully provided by Insign). There is no business at
this time [1]. So we (well I do all the programming) do things
slowly ;-)  Good thing is that we do what we want, what we
think might be fun. Hence the disabled-for-now posting to
manila and radio userland feature. Hence also the poor
support with RSS 1, got borred ready the specs ;-)


We are approaching the end of a big update which should make
the site richer, faster, more extendable. I hope to be able
to beta test this in a couple of weeks (I've been saying this
for 3/4 weeks now, so be warned ;-) ).

The main new feature for end users is a boxless mode to view
sources, more like RU's flat list.

Then I can start working of other features. So now is the
time to start discussing them. HPE (the php code
that runs NewsIsFree) is open source (next version will be
LGPL). I believe this makes it an ideal tool to experiment
with new forms of blogging, news browsing, etc. Please
feel free to participate, either simply by sharing ideas
of how things should be, or by contributing code.

We also want to add searching on the news items (and
exporting of search results), but this requires more
processing power than we currently have (and more SQL
knowledge than I have :-))

Concerning list of channels supported by NewsIsFree, the
entire list will be published in OPML (makes more sence,
to describe categories etc). Will also publish list of
recently added and recently updated channels. Then add
notification (mail, icq, XML-RPC, maybe SOAP) to get
the information flowing... Basically an xmlStorageSystem
implementation in PHP I guess (although you won't be able
to upload files, it'll just contain your subscription file
and the newsblogs, we don't have resources to host more
files).


Hope things can get going and that we can all work
together,


Mike


PS: on a side note, I would like to replace phpNuke with
    something nicer. If only Frontier ran on Linux (might not
    be that hard to do now that it works on OS X).
    Affordable CMS + cheap server would be good!!

[1] Hence the paypal thing. Advertising helps paying for the
    people how use the site, but RSS exports yeald no revenue
    what so ever. And it's getting more hits every day...

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