thinking even more about it - when generating feed why not to generate
as much metadata in as many standards as possible? who knows what may
turn out to be useful ...

<atom:link rel="related" href="http://nytimes/2005/foo" title="Foo">
<atom:link rel="related" href="http://bbc/2005/bar" title="Bar">
<atom:link rel="via" href="http://other-blogger" title="other" />
<atom:link rel="related" href="http://myspace/SomeTopic"/>
<s:link rel="s:topic" xmlns:s="my-space" href="/SomeTopic"/>
<!-- now all kind of tagging -->
<dc:subject>SomeTopic</dc:subject>
<atom:category term="SomeTopic" />
<atom:category scheme="http://myspace/"
           term="SomeTopic">
    <a href="http://myspace/SomeTopic">SomeTopic</a>
</category>
    <!-- i do not think rel="tag" is allowed in ATOM? ow it is going otbe
handled in ATOM 1.x? -->
<atom:link rel="related" href="http://technorati.com/tag/SomeTopic"/>

i wonder if there are more metadata schemas ...

thanks,

alek

--
The best way to predict the future is to invent it - Alan Kay

The rel values specified in Atom 1.0 are as follows: "alternate",
"related", "self", "enclosure", and "via".
http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-ietf-atompub-format/

None of these perform the referencing function as described in my post.

It is true that the rel attribute is extensible, and that values other
than the five listed above may be used, just as RSS 2.0 is very well
known to be extensible.

In my post, in fact, I explicitly described (the outlines of) an
extension rather than a change to the core. But to my knowledge, no
such extension has been discussed or proposed either for RSS 2.0 or
for the link rel element in Atom.

I can an will as needed adopt my own vocabulary for this. As I'm sure
you would agree, though, there's a big difference between me using
such an extension on my own, and the community doing it with some
commonly recognized elements. Hence, my post.

Stephen Downes wrote:
> RSS Referencing
> Stephen Downes
> July 27, 2005
>
> 0. Disclaimers
>
> - Maybe this discussion has already taken place somewhere. But if so,
> I haven't seen it, and pointers would be appreciated.
>
> - Terminology used below is RSS terminology, however the same points
> are intended to be applied to Atopm.
>
> 1. The Disappearing Reference
>
> Back at the beginning, an RSS item had three major elements: title,
> description and link. What to put in the first two of these was always
> reasonably clear. However, an ambiguity existed with respect to the third.
>
> The link element was taken to contain a URL for the item being
> described in the title and the description. This created two
> possibilities: whether the link pointed to one's own article, or
> whether it pointed to an article written by a third party.
>
> For example, the RSS for the New York Times might contain a list of
> articles, and the link for each item would point to the URL of the New
> York Times article, everything being in the nytimes.com domain.
> However, the RSS for Fred's Big Links might point to articles from
> many newspapers, the link in one pointing to nytimes.com and another
> to wapost.com and so on.
>
> When software such as Blogger and LiveJournal embraced RSS, they
> embraced the first model. Thus, every link in every item in the feed
> generated by halfanhour.blogspot.com pointed to an article within the
> halfanhour.blogspot.com domain. RSS, therefore, was thought as a site
> summary document, rather than a linking document.
>
> Over time this has become the dominant model for RSS; my own RSS feed
> - http://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.xml - is one of the very few feeds
> left in the world listing feeds outside the feed domain. Almost all
> feeds point to a page within their own domain. However RSS
> aggregators, such as Daypop, PubSub and Syndicate, provide RSS feeds
> with external links in the link element (as one would expect).
>
> But what if we want to do both? What if we want to, say, create a post
> in Blogger that talks about an external resource, such as an article
> in the NY Times? It seems that we must pick one of the two possible
> links - the blogspot.com link or the nytimes.com link - to put into
> the link element. Blogger, of course, makes the choice for us, placing
> the blogspot.com link into the link element. But now, crucially, the
> nytimes.com link disappears from the RSS (or the Atom, as both have
> this problem).

Actually, I think that you have effectively reconstructed the history
behind why the atom:link is what it is.

Take a look at this presentation from 2003:

http://intertwingly.net/slides/2003/xmlconf/22.html
http://intertwingly.net/slides/2003/xmlconf/23.html
http://intertwingly.net/slides/2003/xmlconf/24.html
http://intertwingly.net/slides/2003/xmlconf/25.html
http://intertwingly.net/slides/2003/xmlconf/26.html

The key point is that in Atom, an entry can have multiple links.  Each
link defines the type of relation via a simple attribute.  The default
for this attribute is "alternate", which (as you indicate) is the
predominant use for this in RSS 2.0 today.

The values that Atom has initially registered for rel values has changed
from that 2003 presentation, and can be found in section 4.2.7.2 of
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-atompub-format-10.txt;
but in any case there is a process by which one can register new rel
values, either that or you can define your own as a fully qualified URI.

Finally, it is quite legal to put elements in other namespaces into RSS
2.0 feeds, and some have advocated doing exactly that:

http://support.journurl.com/users/admin/index.cfm?mode=article&entry=920

- Sam Ruby

On 7/27/05, Stephen Downes <Stephen.Downes@...> wrote:
> When software such as Blogger and LiveJournal embraced RSS, they
> embraced the first model. Thus, every link in every item in the feed
> generated by halfanhour.blogspot.com pointed to an article within the
> halfanhour.blogspot.com domain. RSS, therefore, was thought as a site
> summary document, rather than a linking document.

Not necessarily. Since Ev didn't like the inward-pointing link, it has
always been possible to have the link element point outward with
Blogger feeds: with the RSS 1.0 feeds, rss1:link could go wherever you
wanted, and the permalink was in an l:link element from the link
module (that I don't remember anything actually processing, though it
might have), with the Atom feeds the equivalents are an
atom:link/@rel="related" and atom:link/@rel="alternate". You just have
to go to Settings/Publishing and change Show Link Field to yes.

Phil Ringnalda

RSS Referencing
Stephen Downes
July 27, 2005

0. Disclaimers

- Maybe this discussion has already taken place somewhere. But if so,
I haven't seen it, and pointers would be appreciated.

- Terminology used below is RSS terminology, however the same points
are intended to be applied to Atopm.

1. The Disappearing Reference

Back at the beginning, an RSS item had three major elements: title,
description and link. What to put in the first two of these was always
reasonably clear. However, an ambiguity existed with respect to the third.

The link element was taken to contain a URL for the item being
described in the title and the description. This created two
possibilities: whether the link pointed to one's own article, or
whether it pointed to an article written by a third party.

For example, the RSS for the New York Times might contain a list of
articles, and the link for each item would point to the URL of the New
York Times article, everything being in the nytimes.com domain.
However, the RSS for Fred's Big Links might point to articles from
many newspapers, the link in one pointing to nytimes.com and another
to wapost.com and so on.

When software such as Blogger and LiveJournal embraced RSS, they
embraced the first model. Thus, every link in every item in the feed
generated by halfanhour.blogspot.com pointed to an article within the
halfanhour.blogspot.com domain. RSS, therefore, was thought as a site
summary document, rather than a linking document.

Over time this has become the dominant model for RSS; my own RSS feed
- http://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.xml - is one of the very few feeds
left in the world listing feeds outside the feed domain. Almost all
feeds point to a page within their own domain. However RSS
aggregators, such as Daypop, PubSub and Syndicate, provide RSS feeds
with external links in the link element (as one would expect).

But what if we want to do both? What if we want to, say, create a post
in Blogger that talks about an external resource, such as an article
in the NY Times? It seems that we must pick one of the two possible
links - the blogspot.com link or the nytimes.com link - to put into
the link element. Blogger, of course, makes the choice for us, placing
the blogspot.com link into the link element. But now, crucially, the
nytimes.com link disappears from the RSS (or the Atom, as both have
this problem).

2. The Need for Reference

But who cares, right? After all, if we have the link to the content
document on Blogger, then we have all the information we need. The
author can simply write about the NY Times as part of the post
content, and embed a link into what will eventually become the
description. Problem solved.

But - not really. For one thing, in order to obtain that link to
nytimes.com it is necessary to do extra parsing in order to extract
the href from addresses embedded in the description HTML. For another,
various urls may be embedded in the HTML some of which may not
actually be references but merely helpful links added to make
navigation easier.

The point is, in order to achieve an expressive power anything beyond
merely replicating the content of an HTML page in another format, RSS
(and Atom) needs some sort of reference element.

For example:

- a discussion list is expressed as a series of RSS items. Reference
is used to keep track of which comment replies to which.

- a conference organizer divides the conference into themes, each of
which is represented as an RSS item, and in addition lists each
conference presentation as an item. Reference is used to associate
each presentation with a theme.

- a person presents a paper at a conference and this presentation is
listed as an item in an RSS feed. Another person blogs about that
presentation. Reference is used to associate the blog commentary with
the original paper.

- a person blogs about an article in the New York Times. Reference is
used to associate the blog post with the NY Times article. An
aggregator uses these references to create a collection of blog posts
about this particular article.

- a taxonomy is created as an RSS feed. Reference is used to associate
items at lower levels in the taxonomy with items at higher levels of
the taxonomy.

- a large document is split into several parts, each of which is
described as a separate item. Reference is used to associate each of
those parts with a common title and table of contents page.

3. Alternatives

RSS referencing essentially creates distributed structured metadata.
Because of the desirability of this, various alternatives are already
available. Each alternative, however, has limited applicability and
therefore does not offer a consistent approach to RSS referencing.

- RDF

Several RDF data elements can be used to accomplish some functions of
referencing. For example, RDF subClassOf
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-schema/#ch_subclassof can be used to
represent taxonomical relationships. However no RDF data element
implies referencing specifically.

Referencing may also be accomplished using the rdf:about attribute
inside the item tag, as demonstrated in this column by mark pilgrim.
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html However, this
mechanism is available only to RSS 1.0 and derivatives. Moreover, it
merely relocates the original problem; the example just cited uses the
rdf:about tag to replicate the contents of the link element.

Dublin Core offers several alternatives, including ispartof,
reference, relation and others.
http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-citation-guidelines/ While
extremely useful, these tags do not specify links to external
resources as the link element does, but rather, contain citation
information, such as (say) a bibliographical element.

- Tagging

Various aggregators have attempted to create RSS structure through the
use of tag or category elements. For example, authors blogging a
particular conference, say, NECC, are encouraged to use a given tag,
say NECC. http://technorati.com/tag/NECC

Tagging is not an instance of additional metadata, but rather, the
placement of specific HTML code within the content description (or the
body of a blog post). The NECC tag is created using 'a
href="http://technorati.com/tag/NECC" rel="tag"'. As such, tagging is
therefore an instance of the original problem wherein the extraction
of structure information requires specialized parsing of the link element.

The RSS 2.0 category element is more useful in the sense that it is an
actual XML element, and does not therefore
require separate parsing. http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss
However, this element is used specifically for the purpose of
categorization, and although a link reference could, in theory, be
placed inside a category element, most aggregators are not going to
expect to process this link.

- Conversion of RSS items to channels

Some blog engines have enabled comment RSS feeds. This is typically
accomplished by creating a separate channel for comments; David
Phillips Moveable Type comment feed template provides a good example.
http://tweezersedge.com/archives/2003/10/000157.html

What has happened here is that the original blog post, which began as
an item in another RSS feed, is not represented as a channel. The
value of the link element in the original item is now the value of the
link element in the channel.

This allows association between comments and posts, however, at the
cost of multiplying channels and duplicating post information (once in
the original item element, and once in the channel element).

Moreover, the creation of a separate RSS channel presupposes that all
comments are known, or are located in the same place. Where comments
are distributed - as in, say, blog posts responding to other people's
blog posts - the requiste channel might never be created.

4. Specific Mechanisms

The precise mechanism settled on by the RSS community may vary,
however, in this section I propose a specific mechanism as a template.

Essentially, in order to encode reference in XML, one or more RSS (or
Atom) elements need to be created. These may be core elements, or they
may be extensions.

For now, I will treat these elements as extensions. Accordingly, they
are prefaced with 'ssn' (which stands for 'Semantic Social Network').

- parent - this tag, ecoded 'ssn:parent', is a generic parentage
relation. That is to say, when placed inside an RSS item, it refers
the reader (or aggregator) to a higher level entity. For example, a
chapter in a book would use 'ssn:parent' to point to the book home
page; a comment in a discussion would use 'ssn:parent' to point to the
comment it is replying to. Strictly speaking, only 'ssn:parent' is
required to satisfy the requirements outlined above.

- replyto - this tag, encoded 'ssn:replyto', is used specifically in
the dontext of discussion lists, and is used to point to the comment
to which the given comment replies.

- reference - this tag, encoded 'ssn:reference', is used by a blog
post or similar piece of writing to point to an external resource
being described or referenced by the blog post

Inside the tag, RSS content is displayed as though in a typical RSS
item. This allows a content provider to (optionally) include
information over and above link information, for example, the title of
the resource.

For example:

<channel>
...
<item>
    <title>My Reply</title>
    <link>http://myreplylink</link>
    <description>Blah blah blah</description>
    <ssn:reference>
       <link>http://www.originalpost</link>
       <title>Originial Post</title>
    </ssn:reference>
</item>
</channel>

5. Using References

The intent of a reference is to provide information about an external
entity within the context of the current entity. For example, the
intent of a 'replyto' element in a comment item is to provide
information about a different comment, specifically, the comment being
replied to.

The reference element itself must one specific piece of information,
the URL of the external entity. The intent here is that the URL serves
double duty, both as an indication of the location of the external
entity, and as an identifier for the external entity. It may also
include additional information, such as the title.

In a typical use, when additional information is not provided, it is
anticipated that an aggregator will have the rest of the information
about the external entity - the title, description, and the like -
already harvested and in the database. Therefore, the URL of the
external entry serves as a search parameter, allowing this information
to be retrieved and displayed with the current resource.

In other cases, however, this information will not be available - for
example, a person using Blogger does not have access to this data, nor
does a service that harvests from only a few content feeds. In this
case, the reference, as described above, provides *only* the external
link.

If the service displaying the resource does not have a database of
links, several options remain open:

- to use a generic link title, such as 'Reference', and provide the
URL to the viewer as a link

- use the link to access the HTML page and scrape the title from the
page, then display the title

- use the link to access the HTML page and scrape the 'link rel' tag
to obtain RSS for the page

- (best) use the link as a search term to use at an aggregator that
does have the full RSS or Atom description and will return that XML to you

But that said, the reference element is best used in an environment
that is both a writing and reading environment; for example, it is
better used in an environment like Bloglines, which connects a
blog-authoring service to an aggregator, than to Blogger, which does
not offer a blog aggregation service.

Alternatively, it may be worth considering the embedding of external
information locally.

6. Expanding Reference

The types of reference described in this document are for the most
part content-specific. They describe relations between one type of
content and another.

Not all entities are content entities. Other entities include people,
events, companies and locations.

We have already begin working with reference to some of these other
entities. For example, longitude and latitude data in RSS feeds
http://geourl.org/news/2005/04/26/rssplus.html and GeoURL
http://geourl.org/ convert a place-specific RSS element into a
referenc to an external resource.

Many entities can be described using the simple syntax of RSS with a
minimum of extension. An event, for example, can be desribed in RSS
with the addition of date and location elements. An organization can
be described in RSS with the addition of (say) contact information and
(say) references to organization staff.

Developers in the RSS community (and, for that matter, in other XML
communities) have for the most part not considered seriously the
utility of linkages between entities, being instead focused on
describing the current entity. This focus should, over time, change.

-- Stephen

Hi all,

Anyone using php with pear and the xmlrpc stuff take heed.  An exploit
exists to compromise the box.

http://www.gulftech.org/?node=research&article_id=00087-07012005

Suffice to say I'd have preferred to learn this via mail, not experience.

Meanwhile, GO, right NOW, and run 'pear list-upgrades' on your machine.  If
you're on an apache/php box, that is.

If you've got the old xml_rpc module then run 'pear upgrade XML_RPC'
Seriously consider upgrading any others that have gone stale.  Being
prepared for the usual upgrade foolishness, of course.

-Bill Kearney
Syndic8.com

I thought you might enjoy and critiquing the following analysis of the
two formats and how they could be combined:

http://www.tnl.net/blog/entry/RSS_and_Media:_Can't_we_all_just_get_along?

Looking forward to your feedback (*as soon as I've put the asbetos
flame-repelant suit on*)

TNL

Julian Bond <julian_bond@...> Sat, 25 Jun 2005 20:03:11
>I have a need for RSS feeds from:-
>- Amazon wishlist for a specific person
>- eBay listings from a specific person.

oh, and another one.
- Craigslist listings from a specific person

--
Julian Bond E&MSN: julian_bond at voidstar.com  M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173
Webmaster:             http://www.ecademy.com/  T: +44 (0)192 0412 433
Personal WebLog:      http://www.voidstar.com/  S: callto://julian.bond
                       *** Just Say No To DRM ***

I have a need for RSS feeds from:-
- Amazon wishlist for a specific person
- eBay listings from a specific person.

Anyone got any ideas for finding or creating these?
--
Julian Bond E&MSN: julian_bond at voidstar.com  M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173
Webmaster:             http://www.ecademy.com/  T: +44 (0)192 0412 433
Personal WebLog:      http://www.voidstar.com/  S: callto://julian.bond
                       *** Just Say No To DRM ***

Hi all,

there's new aggregator released - Surfpack 2.0. It is the ultimate desktop
aggregator for all kinds of newsfeeds - it collects RSS/Atom, favorite links,
search engines, weather, horoscopes, and displays them in the browser. While
there
are many RSS aggregators, Surfpack is different:

- Surfpack supports any format that can be displayed in the browser - XML/XSL,
Javascript, pure HTML, with plug-in options.
- Like online services, Surfpack has only HTML GUI and works inside of the
Internet browser - reading and surfing have the same nature
- Surfpack is a Windows desktop application and so is able to aggregate more
personal information if compared with online services.

Any comments are appreciated ! The website is http://www.surfpack.com. If anyone
is interested, there's also a special page for webmasters -
http://www.surfpack.com/editors-webmasters.htm

Regards,
Jury Gerasimov

Softshape Development
mailto:jury@...
http://www.softshape.com

Thank you all very much for your help. I'm very impressed.

Bill, if you can't use javascripts, which other options are there to feed
RSS into web pages?

Jelle Marechal

-----Original Message-----
From: syndication@yahoogroups.com [mailto:syndication@yahoogroups.com] On
Behalf Of Bill Kearney
Sent: Thursday, 26 May 2005 11:41 PM
To: syndication@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [syndication] how easy is RSS fed content integrated on webpage


We generally discourage the use of javascripts or other hacks to feed RSS
into web pages.  More often than not they don't work and waste tremendous
amounts of bandwidth.  That they don't grok encoding is yet another reason
to avoid using them.

-Bill Kearney
Syndic8.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Klaus Johannes Rusch" <KlausRusch@...>


> > *------ Acutally very easy, go to this
> > page **http://net/quickrss/index2.html** enter the url of
> > your feed and place the javascript code on a page of your site. This
> > RSS to html is on my site and will stay active for hopefully forever *
>
> This works great for feeds containing characters from the US-ASCII or
> ISO-8859-1 repertoire but does not work with feeds containing other
> characters (these show up as question marks).




Yahoo! Groups Links

We generally discourage the use of javascripts or other hacks to feed RSS
into web pages.  More often than not they don't work and waste tremendous
amounts of bandwidth.  That they don't grok encoding is yet another reason
to avoid using them.

-Bill Kearney
Syndic8.com

----- Original Message -----
From: "Klaus Johannes Rusch" <KlausRusch@...>


> > *------ Acutally very easy, go to this
> > page **http://net/quickrss/index2.html** enter the url of
> > your feed and place the javascript code on a page of your site. This
> > RSS to html is on my site and will stay active for hopefully forever *
>
> This works great for feeds containing characters from the US-ASCII or
> ISO-8859-1 repertoire but does not work with feeds containing other
> characters (these show up as question marks).

Preston White wrote:

> *------ Acutally very easy, go to this
> page **http://simplestores.net/quickrss/index2.html** enter the url of
> your feed and place the javascript code on a page of your site. This
> RSS to html is on my site and will stay active for hopefully forever *

This works great for feeds containing characters from the US-ASCII or
ISO-8859-1 repertoire but does not work with feeds containing other
characters (these show up as question marks).

--
Klaus Johannes Rusch
KlausRusch@...
http://www.atmedia.net/KlausRusch/

Hi there,

Can somebody answer a few question I have about RSS?


1) How much work is involved for webmasters to integrated the RSS-
code in their page, and have the content feed displayed within a
page-area of defined dimensions (width and height)?

2) Is having external content integrated within their webpages just
a matter of cutting and pasting the XML-code of the RSS file in
their back-end? Or is there some development involved for webmasters
to be able to do this (and have RSS feeds on their site?) In that
case:

3) How much work is involved? Is this easy code (html or script?),
and are there templates or guides available?

4) Would it be feasible to send webmasters RSS code, together with
the code to equip their web-pages as a `RSS fed content aggregator'?

5) How many websites are really geared up to have RSS feeds? Or are
we only talking about a hand-full of portals?

6) To date we are using iframes to syndicate our content. What is
the difference? What advantages does RSS have for webmasters? (I
know RSS has advantages to site-users, but this is another matter)


I really would appreciate a response – please assume I am a 12 year
old child with no real knowledge of html, xml or any scripting code
(asp, php etc…)


Other syndication alternatives to RSS and iframe also greatly
appreciated.

Warm regards,


Jelle Marechal

E-Democracy.Org is a big user of the new GroupServer tool.  It is
XML-based and offers RSS native feeds from this combined e-mail list/web
forum tool.

Before we fund additional features (we are a user), we'd like to gather
ideas on how to make it even more syndication friendly.  Any thoughts?

More GroupServer info:
http://e-democracy.org/groupserver
http://groupserver.org

A sample feed from one of our local forums:
http://forums.e-democracy.org/brighton-hove/groups/bh/messages/view_thre
ad_rss
From:
http://forums.e-democracy.org/brighton-hove/groups/bh/messages

Cheers,
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org


Steven Clift - http://publicus.net - Reply to: clift@...
Join DoWire: http://dowire.org
E-Democracy: http://e-democracy.org

Go to www.phpclasses.org

Search for class RSS_feed by Dr. Timothy Sakach.

Simple and fun class to be worked on.

Glad to help.

----- Original Message -----
From: "birdmidflight" <yahoo@...>
To: <syndication@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, April 01, 2005 3:40 AM
Subject: [syndication] PHP RSS solutions


>
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm looking at including RSS content feeds on a website, and potentially
splicing and dicing
> feeds together into single feeds for inclusion and publishing etc.
>
> So what's a good script solution for including RSS content on my pages?
I've been trying
> Carp, but it doesn't seem to want to include all content tpes like a
feed's image or date.
> I've also seen Magpie.
>
> Thanks, much appreciated.
>

Hi,

I'm looking at including RSS content feeds on a website, and potentially
splicing and dicing
feeds together into single feeds for inclusion and publishing etc.

So what's a good script solution for including RSS content on my pages? I've
been trying
Carp, but it doesn't seem to want to include all content tpes like a feed's
image or date.
I've also seen Magpie.

Thanks, much appreciated.

In the last few days I've seen something about a new service that makes
it easy for blog owners to drop an RSS feed into a gutter column.
Something like blogrolls. Now I can't find it again.

The target is a typepad blog for someone who wants to take a set of
feeds of posts they make on other platforms and drop it into a typepad
margin.

Anyone got ideas on how to do this?

--
Julian Bond Email&MSM: julian.bond at voidstar.com
Webmaster:                 http://www.ecademy.com/
Personal WebLog:          http://www.voidstar.com/
M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173      T: +44 (0)192 0412 433
S: callto://julian.bond/

Sigitas Jakucionis wrote:

>Dear all,
>
>I'm writing thesis on RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom titled
>"Socio-technical Issues Surrounding Content Syndication with RSS and
>Atom in E-commerce". Could you please read part of table of contents
>
>

You should cover the whole RDF debate under "complexity of syntax"

Summary vs Content is a good issue.

Also you should discuss the mod_link module in RSS 1.0 (which was both
brilliant and ahead of its time (*cough*) but wasn't adopted) and the
Atom 0.5 link structure which is essentially the same.

Kevin

--

Use Rojo (RSS/Atom aggregator).  Visit http://rojo.com. Ask me for an
invite!  Also see irc.freenode.net #rojo if you want to chat.

Rojo is Hiring! - http://www.rojonetworks.com/JobsAtRojo.html

If you're interested in RSS, Weblogs, Social Networking, etc... then you
should work for Rojo!  If you recommend someone and we hire them you'll
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Kevin A. Burton, Location - San Francisco, CA
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GPG fingerprint: 5FB2 F3E2 760E 70A8 6174 D393 E84D 8D04 99F1 4412

Or you could just ignore this sort of silliness.

----- Original Message -----
From: "PA" <petite.abeille@...>
> > All your comments are welcome.
>
> Perhaps you could ponder why so called syndication formats closely
> resemble a storm in a tea cup in lights of the advent of RSSDigest in
> 1992:
>
> http://alt.textdrive.com/lua/24/lua-lupads-rssdigest

>    Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 20:54:52 +0000
>    From: Sigitas Jakucionis <sigitas@...>
>    Subject: Thesis on syndication formats
>
>
> Dear all,
>
> I'm writing thesis on RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom titled
> "Socio-technical Issues Surrounding Content Syndication with
> RSS and Atom in E-commerce".

<snip />

Good idea Sigitas. Will you be publishing the thesis so it
may be read by members of the public?

There is little I can offer but a few pithy comments.
Your current topical outline seems 'light' with regard to
'socio' and heavy on the 'technical' wouldn't you agree?

The current outline says little about the use of
syndication on marketing economics, the impact that
syndication will have on those who have hitherto controlled
markets by means of unethical if not fraudulent manipulation
of the economics of publishing (newspapers, magazines and
corrupt broadcast media) and so on.

With my background in developing e-commerce websites I
can foresee the emergence of lightweight loosely coupled
syndicated product information service(s) that merchants
will use to distribute product information to many
participating sites who will earn commissions for referrals,
i.e. a new era of 'affiliate marketing.'

Hope these comments help...

<%= Clinton Gallagher

On Feb 15, 2005, at 21:54, Sigitas Jakucionis wrote:

> All your comments are welcome.

Perhaps you could ponder why so called syndication formats closely
resemble a storm in a tea cup in lights of the advent of RSSDigest in
1992:

http://alt.textdrive.com/lua/24/lua-lupads-rssdigest

Cheers

--
PA, Onnay Equitursay
http://alt.textdrive.com/

Dear all,

I'm writing thesis on RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom titled
"Socio-technical Issues Surrounding Content Syndication with RSS and
Atom in E-commerce". Could you please read part of table of contents
and advise other areas for investigation of syndication formats'
differences. If you suggest area for investigation, could you please
provide some explanation.  All your comments are welcome.

Regards,
Sigitas Jakucionis



Table of Contents

5. TECHNICAL DIFFERENCES OF RSS AND ATOM

5.1 Support for entries in multiple languages
5.2 Ambiguity of speciffication (title, link, summary/content, extensibility)
5.3 Formats (and encoding) of entries
5.4 Security
5.5 APIs for editing and extending
5.6 Interoperability
5.7 Scalability
5.8 Identity of entry
5.9 Complexity of syntax
5.10 Extensibility
5.11 Archiving
5.12 Performance

6. SOCIAL ISSUES

6.1 Vendor neutrality
6.2 Licencing
6.3 Approval of standardization bodies

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 17:27:59 -0000, Tristan Louis wrote:
> I looked around on ATOMenabled.com and there doesn't seem to be any
> mention of new namespaces.

The Finally Atom weblog keeps more up to date than atomenabled.org,
seems like:

http://danja.typepad.com/fecho/

Since Atom 0.3, the Atom format has moved to the process for becoming
an IETF standard. The current version is draft-ietf-atompub-format-05:

http://ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-atompub-format-05.txt

It says the proper namespace URI is:

http://purl.org/atom/ns#draft-ietf-atompub-format-05

The IETF Internet-Draft boilerplate says, "It is inappropriate to use
Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as
'work in progress,'" so as I understand it, pre-Internet-Draft version
0.3 is still the "current version" for implementations. I don't think
anyone is implementing the Atom format past 0.3 until it goes "1.0" as
an IETF RFC, other than to study and develop the format. Tim Bray
wrote recently that the working group is pretty close to submitting
Atom for RFC-ization, though:

http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/01/24/LastAtomIssues
http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2005/01/30/Engagement

I'm not formally involved with the Atom process, but I hope that
helps.

--
Mark Paschal
markpasc@...

So I'm doing some cleaning up on my feeds and noticed that the
namespace for ATOM .3 (http://purl.org/atom/ns# ) seems dead. I looked
around on ATOMenabled.com and there doesn't seem to be any mention of
new namespaces.

Did that format die? Or did I miss the memo talking about format and
namespace changes?

TNL
Still (foolishly) trying to support as many syndication formats as
possible...

----------
Tristan Louis
http://www.tnl.net

   From: "birdmidflight" <yahoo@...>
Subject: Aggregated news source syndication?

How/where can I find/use feeds that mush together UK news stories of different types?

-- ---------------------.sig--------------------------
Stephen Downes ~ National Research Council Canada
http://www.downes.ca ~ stephen@...
---------------------------------------------------
The best daily online learning news and opinion:
OLDaily ~ http://www.downes.ca/news/OLDaily.htm
--------------------------------------------------- 

This is probably old news but I was just looking at the new MSN News
Search and it's RSS feed and discovered that every entry seems to be
coming from Moreover.

I'd given up on Moreover years ago, because they were progressively
hiding their RSS and the aggregation wasn't great. And now I find it's
all available again and out in the open.

I hope their getting some money from this.

--
Julian Bond Email&MSM: julian.bond at voidstar.com
Webmaster:                 http://www.ecademy.com/
Personal WebLog:          http://www.voidstar.com/
M: +44 (0)77 5907 2173      T: +44 (0)192 0412 433
S: callto://julian.bond/

How/where can I find/use feeds that mush together UK news stories of different
types?

For example, Google News offers up news stories in various categories (ie.
Sport, Health)
and, of course, their alorithm, cleverly avoids repetition of stories on the
same subject (I'm
aware Google News doesn't syndicate out to RSS at this stage - Atom etc.?).

How does TodaysPapers.com do what it does?
That little site has a couple of hundred stories each listed across 12
categories.
Where do they get these stories from? Is it a matter of one selecting feeds
himself from
sites that offer them, then combining them somehow (a "feedroll")?
Or do they just come in from some aggregation/wire service that's already done
that, like
Moreover, or... Google!?
How are they fed in?
Can I get UK-specific feeds?

How do these guys deal with multiple stories on the same subject?
Obviously, Google has some fancy algorithm to group similar stories. But,
without
something like that, you wouldn't dozens of publishers' stories on the same
subject
coming in, would you?
Also confused about gaguing "popular" stories (maybe there's a feed somewhere
for *that*
as well?).

So many questions :)

Thank-you very much for your help.

The following syndication poll is now closed.  Here are the
final results:


POLL QUESTION: What should be the standard for feed
subscription?

CHOICES AND RESULTS
- Joe's Mime-Type based method, 6 votes, 42.86%
- Dare's feed: URI scheme, 3 votes, 21.43%
- Phil's Feed Playlist, 3 votes, 21.43%
- Dave's Centralized Subscription Service, 2 votes, 14.29%



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