Comments on: Good and Bad RSS Syndication Practices

By: Andrew Turner

Andrew Turner — Sun, 06 May 2007 15:25:46 +0000

Very good points. And more feeds/sites are specifying in their HTML meta tags Creative Commons or other licensing. However, there isn’t currently a standard mechanism for recognizing this in feeds. There is a ‘license’ element, but the contents of it are free-form.

It would be useful if there was some straight-forward, machine-readable mechanism for specifying simple criteria of a feed, and even of individual items in a feed (for aggregation of multiple feeds into a single feed).

For example, being able to specify via the license element, attributes for: attribution, commercial, derivatives, norestriction, and even the over-arching, dontaggregate.

By: Paul M. Watson

Paul M. Watson — Sun, 06 May 2007 14:02:04 +0000

I think you need to explain “Opt-in” further. I never opted into Technorati, Google or Bloglines yet my feed is in each.

Wouldn’t an opt-out (partly via robots.txt) be a better system? Opt-in makes network effect very difficult to take advantage of.

By: Eric Rice

Eric Rice — Sun, 06 May 2007 05:07:25 +0000

I think the winner there is "Opt-in" unless you are a pure search play (which I think many services would try to spin). If I want to be in a network directory service thing, I'll add myself, thanks. The devil's advocate in this is, what's the difference between a podcast network vs a google.com and such. We don't opt-in to Google, should we? And yes I realize that google leaves the links as is.. it's more a conceptual issue. Ultimately, opt-in. (Side note: I haven't updated many many podcast feeds for months and yet they are listed in various directories. That's a neat trick, eh?)

By: Kosso

Kosso — Sun, 06 May 2007 04:19:08 +0000

Great list Todd!

Re: opt-in and claim:

We will be adding a claim feed feature to podcast.com, after we open the doors up to users, once we iron out a few bugs here and there.

This will enable the feed publisher to access more info about the traffic garnered from their feed – and also open up other opportunities. And also opt out of the ‘feedpool’ if they so wish.

However, we want people to find feeds through us, rather like I find a website via google (once our search is fixed up) – but I can’t imagine many feed publishers wanting to avoid being in the ‘feedpool’, in the same way that I doubt many people want to stop Google from indexing their public content for people to find.

It depends on the content though, of course.

Hopefully, by Gnomedex I’ll have a lot more to say about all this, is also the importance and power of OPML, given the right tools, in relation to all of the above.

Cheers!
K