Random Bytes...by Ross Rader :: The RSS Subscription Problem

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by Ross at 08:28AM (EST) on January 12, 2005 | Permanent Link

RSS: "Yahoo sends emails to bloggers with RSS feeds saying, hey if you put this icon on your weblog you'll get more subscribers. It's true you will. Then Feedster says the same thing, and Bloglines, etc etc. ...all those logos, when will it end?"

Dave Winer has floated a very timely proposal to run a community subscription management server to help solve the problem. I was just about to implement "Yet Another Subscription Logo" and if this comes up to speed fast enough, I'm pretty sure that I can get this into Tucows "about to be announced but still secret" Skydasher project.

Given Dave's history running www.weblogs.com, audio.weblogs.com and other community servers, I can't think of a better steward to manage this resource in the interests of the community.

In other Skydasher related news, we'll be opening up our beta program shortly and we're looking for a large number of users to help us test things out. Better yet, we're also looking for different types of users to help us out. Selected beta testers matching a specific profiles will actually get paid to help us with these tests. Leave a comment here or drop me a note if you are interested in getting more information when we take the wraps off.

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Comments

Re: The RSS Subscription Problem

by Mike Rowehl on Wed 12 Jan 2005 02:55 PM EST | Profile | Permanent Link

Hey Ross, this is Mike Rowehl, we met at Gnomedex last year. I'm working over at Feedster now, and we were talking about this issue last week. I actually proposed a solution to this kind of problem this past weekend, and posted some example code:

http://www.bitsplitter.net/blog/index.php?p=388

What I had proposed was a simple redirection service more than a centralized subscription service, but even at that I was trying to figure out how to get the centralized redirector out of the picture. I posted the code to try to get some discussion going, so if you're interested please mail me or leave me a comment. I would love to see the problem get solved in some form, hopefully in a way that's maximally inclusive.

Re: Re: The RSS Subscription Problem

by Ross on Wed 12 Jan 2005 03:52 PM EST | Profile | Permanent Link

Mike - congrats on landing @ Feedster - hope its a fun gig ;-) Sorry I missed the Backchannel party but I got my wires crossed with my ride.

I'm mainly interested in making sure that my users get a great experience. I'll definitely check out what you've put together as well. At some point it would make some great sense to try and get us all in the same place to talk about these things and figure out a path forward. DevDex? :)