Hunting The Muse

Decentralized RSS Syndication

Two Steps to Decentralized RSS Syndication

What is the need for Decentralized RSS Syndication? Well, first let's define some terms.

RSS is a way to quickly sling around headlines and summaries (and sometimes full content) of articles that other people write. If I have an article I write on my site, then I can make an RSS (Rich Site Summary) file of it that other people and programs can subscribe to. So they'll automatically notice when I write.

Syndication is republishing someone else's content.

Decentralized means everyone collaborates and does it and it grows virally.

It's something of a holy grail for DIY journalism.

Step One - Subscribed Re-publishing: TrackFrom

In the past I'd manually go to another person's blog, decide I liked the content, and blog (republish) a link to it on mine. Subscribing has been problematic. It might mean I'd get a blog entry through email but it's still coming to me.

There are two other existing options. I could write a scraper, but that's rude and bandwidth-intensive. A more elegant solution has been creating a trackback url to my blog and then asking other people to trackback my blog when they post. But that relies on them doing it.

So instead what should exist is a way to ping someone's blog, automatically giving them my trackback url, having their blog system note it down, and then whenenever the person blogs to that blog, it will automatically trackback mine.

This could be an approvable action, and could exist for only certain subcategories, by someone publicizing their "subscribe" trackfrom link. Or it could be in a link header.

Step Two - Filtering

People could choose for the blogged that is tracked to to be private. A tool could be written for the person to quickly review all the links and then publish them to a real live blog, perhaps interspersed with their own entries.

The filtering would be only to get rid of duplicates or entries thought to be irrelevant.

Both of these put together would be a way to fully automate dynamic DIY decentralized journalism. Posted by Curt at January 10, 2003 02:34 PM