I want a site where I can specify webfeeds that I want archived. It
will spit them back out when I ask for them, with as many items as I
like. Reliable archiving, no loss, all the data that was in the
original items is present. Back to the first day I entered the feed
into the system.
What would I do with this? For starters, I'd use it to keep a backup of every feed that I produce.
This would also minimize the pain of migrating my data to other tools,
as all of it would be trivially retrievable (assuming, obviously, that
all the information was present in the feed in the first place) in a
widespread format.
There are already several services that store webfeed content (Bloglines, Feedster, and Blogdigger to name just a few), but as far as I know none of them provides the interface to access this valuable data store.
David Wilcox may have found a common thread running through what we do (via Nancy):
If your job or passion is to do good communications work using new
technology, how do you think of yourself? Others may call you variously
a blogger, online journalist, community manager, information worker,
editor, researcher, even hacker. Perhaps we'll find some shared
interests wearing the badge of knowledge activist.
"The current trend, in academia, is to develop crazy algorithms that
require not 10 lines of code, not 100 lines of code, but several
thousands. I think the same is true in some industries: think of Web
Services or Java (with the infinite number of new acronyms).
Well,
I like complex algorithms and as a math guy, I like a challenge, but
once in a while, I think it pays to go I think “wait! what if the
average Joe wants to implement this?” "
Someday I'm sure the preceding hodge-podge will exist in one system;
iTunes is most of the way there. But such a system is likely to be for
pay and limited to the content available in somebody's master library
of licensed material. As klugey as MP3 blogs, podcasting and Webjay
are, they're open-ended and limited only by the content the web at
large chooses to make available.
Prentiss also uses his aggregator to watch for new
music through selected human filters. See my "Small pieces of music,
loosely joined" post of last month to see how you can use the Bloglines
aggregator and a Play this Page bookmarklet to build a personalized
radio out of podcasts or MP3 webfeeds. Hey, perhaps there is a business
in making all this non-kludgey and user-friendly. A sort of Kinja for MP3 feeds. Hmmm...
