Re: [syndication] A wacky idea but what the heck

[Julian Bond <julian@netmarketseurope.com>]

In article <223b01c0f119$af43dab0$33a1dc40@murphy>, Dave Winer
<dave@userland.com> writes
>    A way to broadcast the existence of other sources in your source. 
>    Let other channels hitch a ride on yours.

I've been thinking about the difference in approach between Userland and
more traditional directories in terms of lists of RSS sources. This is a
bit generalized and not completely true, but the Userland approach is
becoming one of automatically collecting channels as a by-product of
activity while for years directories have been about trying to build a
perfect list.

I think this has some relevance for ratings and categorization as well.
The trick is to use people's activity to virally create and propagate
metadata with no additional actions from the users and in the
background.

In RSS, if we go with Dave's idea, I think we should be including a
pointer to the subscription list, not the list itself. We've already got
a format in OCS. So it would be quite simple to include an entry in the
<channel> definition which was a URL of an OCS file containing the
channels known about by the generator of the file. This is not going to
be relevant for all generators, but I can imagine some situations where
this could work.

An aggregator could then start with the RSS files, spider the pointer to
the OCS file and then add what it finds to it's local feed list. Right
now, the directories have had a lot of work put into them and are
getting pretty all-inclusive and accurate but if RSS took off a little
faster the human editorial approach is not going to be scalable.

-- 
Julian Bond eMail: julian@netmarketseurope.com
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