In the beginning, weblogs were little personal pages where you wrote whatever you felt like writing, and a few of your friends, an odd family member, a crazed stalker and other people who were into blogging read it. Many blogs are still little personal pages read only if you're lucky by friends, family, bloggers and...
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Are you sick and tired of people telling you to publish a newsfeed? I sure am. So today, I'm going to give you a break and discuss why you shouldn't publish a newsfeed. Feel free to use these arguments to tell people to shut up and mind their own business.

1) It's too much trouble...
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A few days ago, Amy Gahran posted on her Contentious Weblog (no, I don't mean it's an unfriendly weblog, that's the blog's title) a response to Google's sending a cease-and-desist to someone who'd been providing a service to convert Google News searches to RSS. As much as I'd love to see RSS feeds of Google...
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When I first heard the terms "blog" and "blogging", to be honest, I was turned off by them. The slang flavor of the terms gave the impression that it was the domain of egomaniacal script kiddies. I had no problem with the term "web logging", but why "blogging"? It just didn't roll naturally off the...
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Last year, there was some discussion of creating a profile for RSS to standardize its usage without changing the specification. From what I can tell, no profile was ever adopted--at least not by more than a few people. Had a profile been widely adopted, Atom would likely have received far less support.

No profile was...
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A week ago, I wrote a little about the challenge of finding quality newsfeeds. As I wrote, I got an idea for a new newsfeed directory that would make that easier. Since then, I've dropped most of my other work, copied a bunch of code from my existing sites, twisted and bullied it and written...
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Each format: RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom, Info Bite , etc. requires a certain set of elements and attributes. Why are certain elements required? Which should be required?

Some elements are required so that client and aggregator software can depend on being able to do certain things with feeds. For example, an Atom feed is...
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Should RSS, Atom, et al be aggregated by client or server software? Either way has its advantages and disadvantages.

Client:

• You don't have to be online while reading the feeds, as long as you've gone online to download them (though you'll need to go online to access things the feeds link to).

• Speed:...
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Weblogs may have started out as personal babbling pages, and many still are, but more and more, weblogs are taking a mainstream news and communications role. This year's political campaigns have adopted weblogs as a way to reach a wider audience. People are getting paid for blogging. What is the future of weblogs as a...
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Well, I've updated the Info Bite List specification again, based partly on some of the issues mentioned at the end of a recent posting here. Today, I'll talk about the changes and why I made them as a round-about way of discussing issues facing all RSS-like formats.

First, I changed the default mode for content...
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