RSS Aggregator with Trust Experience

OK, the title is a bit contrived, just so I could get a cool acronym (RATE -- it will all make sense in a minute).

I was reading Critical Section after surfing my referrer logs (does Drupal have TrackBack? I don't know...) and added their RSS feed to my daily list. I could add them to the feeds here, and I should probably get in the habit of doing that -- makes it easier to link to, rather than cutting and pasting a bunch of URLs.

So, I just added a particular blog/site to my "daily news". What about Phil? Or Greg? Or Graham? etc. etc. All these people that are somewhat interested in the same thing should be able to be fed news that their friends are also interested in/found interesting.

But maybe this doesn't need another mechanism. Perhaps the intertwingling of blogs, trackbacks, comments, etc. are already creating it naturally. And perhaps this is what Google is going to try and surf, to try and using human experience to do this RATE with, so that people outside the trust web can use the collective experience of people to find information.

Wow. I think I just blew my own brain. Too much coffee.

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July 20, 2005 - 6:18pm — Sam Sethi (not verified)

RATE works for me.

For the last few weeks I have been grappling with the very same stuff as your blog suggests you have. OPML editors, RSS extensions etc. I am forming a new business podcasting service and one fo the things I am looking to implement is a RATE(ing) system so that people who subscribe to one RSS channel and a particular feed might alert their tursted friends to that information. Well there are two things curently occurring that might work to make this happen. Firstly OPML looks like it is being extended to include an alert tag within the feed so that new or deleted feeds can be alerted to your friends. But how do you create a trusted friends list. This might be possible by using FOAF - friend of a friend.

Now I can imagine creating my FOAF profile and then from that creating my FOAF trusted network list. Then as I subscribe to various RSS/Podcasts I automatically create my OPML list which is associated (some how) with my FOAF file. As I add or delete new RSS subsriptions then my FOAF file knows who to alert to my changes.

I think this makes sense. It is 2am in the UK and a coffee is not what I need. I think it is sleep.

Thanks

Sam