Some thoughts on Syndication and Aggregation
26 May 2007Syndication feed formats (RSS/Atom) seems to have support for various kind of metadata (directly or through extensions/modules). However, not all publishers seems to be using it consistently. I also notice, presentation specific markup being mixed with metadata. Is it because feed-publishers assume client to be a web-browser?
For example:-
- Description text is in complex-html (presentation specific).
- Inserting advertisements in certain places </ul>
- How to take care of branding?
- How to show advertisements? </ul>
With Rich Internet Application platforms (Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Apollo, Microsoft WPE/WPF etc), content can be presented into different metaphor provided it's easy to get the relevant data and related metadata from feeds. Above example poses a simple problem of extracting description (actual metadata), if it's semantic-html it's cool otherwise a problem for client to parse and extract data. Similarly, there could be more problems and inconsistencies in feed-publishing as of today.
Monetization and Advertisement through Syndication are not totally solved problems, most of the solutions available today only work in context of web-browser.
If feed reader(aggregator) is something else (f.ex: Adobe Flash/Apollo client or Microsoft WPF/WPE) than Web-Browser:-
I am sure, these can be solved using syndication formats it's just we need to do it consistently. Also, while publishing feeds it's good idea to think of all kind of clients that would be consuming it.
Note: I am fairly new Syndication/Aggregation, whatever I talk here is based on my experiences and understanding in last a few years. Problems, I faced while writing aggregators, clients or feed-publishing-engines.
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