Tuesday, April 15, 2003

ENT - topics in an RSS feed Announcing: ENT v1.0 Easy News Topics for RSS2.0. Paolo and I are pleased to announce the release of the first public draft of the Easy News Topics (ENT) specification. ENT1.0 is an RSS2.0 module designed to make it really easy to incorporate topics into RSS feeds. Why would you want to do that? Because it will help to enable a raft of new, smarter, aggregator products. [Marc's Voice] I think I get it. I just received "RSS for Content Syndication", so the overall architecture of RSS is starting to come into focus. RSS 2.0 modules seem like a powerful way to extend for the format in interesting ways. Nice to see a solid module be produced... now lets see which aggregators adopt it. 11:31:16 AM

RSS? OPML? ENT? Mark pointed to Matt who's talking about a new module (ENT) for RSS 2.0. Sounds neat, but what I really need someone to do is evolve the spec for OPML. Instead of me having to re-categorize my feeds every time I install a new RSS parser, the OPML file should have pre-definied categories. And, instead of me having to maintain separate OPML files for all of my parsing applications, programmers should start enabling the user to dynamically load feeds from a centralized (local or remote) OPML file. C'mon folks - let's get smart with this stuff. I understand the need to maintain a proprietary database for the program in question, but your app shouldn't require me to maintain separate feed subscriptions. I'm not a programmer - I'm a user. And damnit, why can't "you" help make OPML smarter and more convenient for me?... [C:PIRILLO.EXE ~ Chris Pirillo] The feature request above is one that I have as well. I discovered it when I exported my RSS feeds from NetNewsWire, and tried to re-import them, only to discover that my categorization information was stripped bare. The more I follow the blogosphere, the more feature requests I see! There are a ton of desktop news aggregators out there, but none of them are taking a serious commercial approach to creating software. How much is a feature like this worth? Probably not much by itself, but in aggregate, I think a commercial desktop news manager could sell for several hundred dollars per seat. 11:26:19 AM

A Beginner's Guide to TrackBack By popular demand, we wrote up A Beginner's Guide to TrackBack.... [Movable Type News] Hey, I'm cutting edge, and I don't even have this stuff sorted out yet... so off I go! 11:22:46 AM