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

["Dave Winer" <dave@userland.com>]

Julian, FYI, I wasn't thinking it would be a subscription list, I was
thinking it would be an editorial product, like the left-edge links on
weblogs. Dave


----- Original Message -----
From: "Julian Bond" <julian@netmarketseurope.com>
To: <syndication@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, June 11, 2001 5:34 AM
Subject: Re: [syndication] A wacky idea but what the heck


> 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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