Re: [syndication] "Narrowcasting" RSS

["Bill Kearney" <wkearney99@hotmail.com>]

> The problem is the very personalized nature of the feed. My
> understanding of how most RSS aggregators work is that a central
> "authority" identifies and adds feeds to a particular interface.

No, a web portal site that's presenting the contents of RSS feeds may do that.
Some, like newsisfree, give you the ability to sign up and have it keep track of
your selected channels.  Others don't.  But a personal aggregator like peerkat,
blosxom, amphetadesk, headline viewer, feed reader, newzcrawler and others do
let you control which feeds are being shown.

> Thus
> I can't add my "saved search on foo" so that only I can see it. I can
> imagine that there's an existence proof that some interface out there
> allows the ueser to directly add their own feeds, but what is desired
> is that a user of my search engine could add their "saved search on
> foo" (and *not* their "saved search on bar") to their favorite
> aggregator.

Sure and using a personal aggregator lets you do this.

> Am I right in my understanding of this problem? I have to admit to a
> merely theoretical understanding of RSS with the belief that I
> probably use it more often than I know (except for early experiments
> with my.netscape).

my.netscape was indeed a web portal that allowed very little per-user control.
Fortunately things have changed since then!

> PS: I was happy to discover, I'm not the only person to want saved
> searches available ia RSS: "In the future, I hope to retrieve saved
> searches from the popular news engines like World News via RSS feeds
> and postings to listservs to which I subscribe. " See
> http://www.llrx.com/features/rssforlibrarians.htm

Mailing lists running up on yahoo are already capable of providing an RSS feed
of new items as they're posted:
http://www.syndic8.com/feedlist.php?ShowMatch=groups.yahoo.com

There's cool stuff that can be accomplished with syndication.  I'd argue that
not everything is suitable for it.  All these folks running around with
aggregators, outliners and portals might do well to hold up a second and look at
the big picture.  Syndication stands to play a much larger part than it has in
the past.  But there's still plenty of situations where good old web pages and
thick clients still excel.

-Bill Kearney