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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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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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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One of the challenges facing users of RSS and Atom feeds is finding feeds worth subscribing to. If you're lucky enough to be looking for a feed on a subject addressed by a major news organization, and you can find a major news organization that publishes newsfeeds, life's not so bad (except that it's still...
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I've written before about how to market newsfeeds to consumers. Today, I'll discuss marketing newsfeeds to webmasters.

To illustrate some of the motivations and challenges relevant to marketing to webmasters, I'll relate my entry into the newsfeed world. I took my first steps into the world of RSS about a year and a half ago....
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One problem that can plague tools for building or processing any standardized type of document, whether it be RSS, Atom, Info Bite List, web pages, etc., is the question of what to do with invalid documents. Because so many people learn by imitation, the internet is a fertile breeding ground for incorrectly coded documents. What...
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I've posted version 1.0.1 of the Info Bite List specification, exposing my hubris in declaring the previous specification version 1.0. At issue was the fact that the link element had a type attribute which referred to the MIME type of the object being linked to, but, as with any other element which can have a...
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