Finding Feeds

[Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>]

One of the bees in my bonnet for a while has been finding feeds.

While efforts like syndic8, newsisfree and newsfeeeds.manillasites
are great, users shouldn't have to page through directories to find
out if their favourite content is available as a feed, at least not
by default. These are fine tools to *supplement* the finding of
feeds, but there needs to be a first-order means of doing it that
leverages the current way the Web works.

This is exemplified by Dave's call for a CNet feed, and then having
to retract it. Dave's special; he's got a weblog that thousands of
people can send feedback to, pointing these things out (well, this is
good and bad, I imagine ;). The poor person-on-the-street doesn't
have this, and that's why RSS isn't growing as fast as it could.

What I'm saying is that there needs to be an easy way to find a
relevant feed *when you're looking at a page*. In the long run, this
probably means through a META tag, or similar, when browsers support
it. In the short term, it probably means a way that someone can put a
link on their page that says something to the effect of "feed here",
which, when followed, will pass that URI to their aggregator
automagically.

A few months ago, I circulated a specification that tried to do this.
It hasn't really gone somewhere, but I'm convinced that this is
something that needs to happen, somehow, in this community. There is
a tecnical component, and there's an evangelisation part as well.
Currently, there are a few examples of this (Netscape's 'add channel'
button, and some other aggregator-specific mechanisms), but these
don't work for everybody's aggregator; I want something that does.

If anyone is interested in getting there, I'll be glad to do what I
can. To me, this is the #1 blocker to syndication, even compared to
the RDF wars...

There. I'm done.

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