25 Oct 2002 LotR   » (Master)

Matt Webb writes about syndication:

I want to grab XML from all over the web and use it on my pages. I'd like all the information on my pages to be the latest possible, otherwise it's not really very useful. However, I can't do that: Every single time I grab that lovely RSS I'm hitting somebody else's server. That's not good, and why the policy both at weblogs.com and blogger.com is that you should only grab their XML data once per hour.

He then goes on proposing we need a system like NNTP to distribute the RSS, but dismisses NNTP itself.

His article made me wonder if NNTP would really be such a bad idea to do syndication. Matt focusses on a replacement for (the distribution of) RSS feeds, but why not syndicate your entire content instead?

The biggest advantage of this is that the reader can easily read the entire thread that was sparked by the initial blog entry, either because he's using a newsreader, or because you were able to easily include replies on the web version of your blog.

Another advantage of content syndication is that you can easily create custom views. For example, have a script to display the latest entries from blogs you are interested in, like advogato's recentlog, or a blog of entries that talk about a certain subject.

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