It’s just data

weblogUpdates

Dave Winer:  For ten points, guess what this is the start of.  Mind if I make a few suggestions?  Actually, only one suggestion, and then a few nits.  The suggestion is to change "when=" to "etag=".  That way aggregators which support etags won't have to track an additional item.  As for the nits, I'm not sure that name is worth the bandwidth, but it would be nice if this element were renamed title.  Is this format only useful for weblogs or could it be used for other things?  And please don't name the file rss.xml, that's a bit confusing.

I wasn't asking for feedback.

Sometimes I just like to have fun.

Posted by Dave Winer at

Damn. Looks real promising. Could dramatically address the RSS bandwidth issue.

Posted by Sam Ruby at

This *does* look promising.

As I understand the feature, a *centralized* aggregator will publish a feed of weblogs that have recently updated, and a *desktop* aggregator can (by subscribing to the update-feed) avoid polling those feeds, except when notified of new content.

Question: will I as a weblog publisher have to notify more than one centralized aggregator that I have new content, or will the centralized aggregators share notifications with each other as peers?

Posted by Michael Bernstein at

Call me dumb [plenty of people have], but what does this let you do that the current weblogs.com/changes.xml doesn't already do ?

Posted by Simon Fell at

url in changes.xml looks to be the blog itself (i.e., html).

url in rss.xml looks to be the feed for the blog. I've seen RDF, RSS, and ScriptingNews2 entries in there.

There rss.xml appears to be a subset of entries from changes.xml. In particular, it seems to line up pretty well with Dave's subscriptions

Posted by Sam Ruby at

Coooool. Now you're getting into the puzzle. Sam, you are right that the feeds in the list (they are feeds, not weblogs) are those that I subscribe to that have changed. But that's just to help get the process started. It's the beginning of another bootstrap, like the one we did in 1999 for weblogs.com, but this time for RSS feeds. It may be part of the solution for the scaling problem many of us feel is right around the corner.

BTW, check out the referers on Hack-The-Planet. The Etag changes can be seen in lower traffic on one site that many of us have been watching.

Posted by Dave Winer at

Hmm.

So, if my desktop aggregator is subscribed to your desktop aggregator's changes feed, weblog update information can propagate once any aggregator (centralized or desktop) notices an updated weblog.

Cool.

Question: How do I discover peers who subscribe to the feeds I am interested in? Do weblogs (and/or aggregators) publish who their subscribers are?

Posted by Michael Bernstein at

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