Re: [syndication] ANN: RSS 'ping' interface at fyuze.com

[Eric Bohlman <ebohlman@earthlink.net>]

7/1/02 10:02:00 PM, "justin klubnik" <pseudonym@mindspring.com> wrote:
>  RSS aggregators work by using the crawling approach, fetching RSS feeds at
>  set intervals to look for updates. Most of time, the majority of the feeds
>  fetched have not updated, but there is no way to be sure unless each feed is
>  checked. This takes time, and can place a load on sites that host feeds. A
>  ping-style approach would be more effective and (time) accurate.

The problem I see with this approach is that each feed site would need to keep track of all the 
aggregators that aggregate it and remember to ping them.  What would be nice is if aggregators could 
exchange lists of recent pings (or possibly have some other service whose only purpose is to "flood" 
pings).  That way each feed site would only have one place it needed to ping.