Red Light Feeds That Matter for Glocalz

stringfellows paris
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Dare has some great posts from Etech on Danah's G/Localization presentation and the one I would have really loved to hear is "Feeds That Matter", which Niall Kennedy kicked off with a trip down retro PointCast Push and Netscape RDF. From what my Tech Team tells me, we are getting very similar problems as covered in the discussion. (esp 15% validity and multiple feed formats) Dare :

- too many readers hitting feed providers
- payloads to feeds getting bigger due to enclosures
- users suffering from information overload due to too many feeds
- subscription and discovery are complicated
- multiple feed formats
- XML is often invalid - Google Reader team blogged that 15% of feeds ae invalid
- roaming subscriptions between PCs when using a desktop reader

"There are also developer specific issues such as handling multiple formats, namespaced extension elements, searching feeds, synchronization and ensuring one follows HTTP best practices that benefit when there exists a platform that already does the heavy lifting. Companies such as Google, NewsGator and Microsoft provide different platforms for processing feeds which can be used to either enhance existing feed readers or build new ones."