Re: [aggregators] RSS Auto-Discovery 2.0

[Jeremy Zawodny <jeremy@zawodny.com>]

On Fri, Sep 12, 2003 at 02:14:27PM -0700, Troy Hakala wrote:
> As an aggregator author, we'll do anything that becomes a standard 
> and we'd certainly welcome this. And from a quick look, it seems simple 
> enough. But the real work here is getting content-creators to use it. 
> Very few sites (in my experience) use the current auto-discovery 
> method.

I suspect that most sites don't do it today because:

  1. They don't know it exists.  How man RSS info sites explain the
     benefits of adding the link tag?

  2. It's difficult to see a direct benefit.  Yes, some aggregators
     will notice it, but it's less tangible that putting the orange
     button on a page. 

  3. It's really only half a solution.  The current system doesn't
     work so well for larger sites, as I describe.

But I'm not sure what the real reasons are.  However, if "we" can
agree on something, you can expect us to advocate it in the hope of
swaying more traditional publishers too...

> It seems to me that the weblog software authors are the ones to talk
> to about implementing it, then the rest will follow (hopefully).

Hmm.  I see it the other way around.  Weblog software authors are
doing a much better job today than more traditional content creators.
Again, RSS is about more than weblogs.  The weblog community has done
a very good job so far.  It's the other guys we need to think about.

Jeremy
-- 
Jeremy D. Zawodny     |  Perl, Web, MySQL, Linux Magazine, Yahoo!
<Jeremy@Zawodny.com>  |  http://jeremy.zawodny.com/