Bear Flag Republic Radio Weblog

Create Custom Experimental XML Feeds.

"Radio's RSS writer is now user-extensible. The RSS writer in Radio is now officially user-extensible. 'Before generating the RSS, we check user.radio.callbacks.writeRssFile,' Dave writes today. Excellent. This will open the floodgates for all sorts of useful metadata experimentation. We'll see Radio UserLand sites emitting RSS 1.0, and others extending RSS .9x. It's not the format that matters to me, it's the experimentation. ... [Jon's Radio] 

This is brilliant news.  Ordinary Radio users like me can now experiment with tagging topical categories of posts related to 'official' court filings (such as opinions), court rules, and FAQs.   Enabling an end user to sort, filter or interpret by topical content.

One Small Example:  A lawyer in New Orleans, is watching the progress of asbestos mass litigation in the courts of Louisiana, becomes aware that very similar issues involving medical monitoring and asbestos mass litigation are pending before the West Virginia Supreme Court.  If the WV court has an XML feed for recent opinions (which we do), the lawyer in New Orleans could subscribe to that feed and watch for orders and opinions regarding asbestos mass litigation.  Understandably, however, the lawyer in New Orleans may not want to read all of the posts about another jurisdiction's opinions - only those concerning limited issues.  With this new feature, the lawyer in New Orleans can target the request, saving bandwidth and precious screen time." [Rory Perry's Radio Weblog]

I don't pretend to understand exactly what all of this means, but I can tell this is a Martha Stewart Good Thing. In fact, I suspect this may somehow solve my RSS truncation issue, but I'll have to wait for more informed minds to weigh in on this one.

What I do see as the bigger issue is that this provides a path for further news aggregator development in Radio. I'm not knowledgeable enough to know what it means for RSS news aggregation in general, but I believe quite strongly that some form of aggregation will become part of our everyday information lives in the future, so I welcome any and all roads that lead to that day.

[The Shifted Librarian]
comments < 9:13:38 PM        >

Guest DaveNet: The Big Lie, by Adam Curry.  [Scripting News]
comments < 9:12:07 PM        >