Wired News has a beautiful new (beta) application for RSS. Give it a search term, and it returns articles that include the term. For example, this feed shows all the articles that contain my name; subscribe to it, and you'll be informed of anything new written about me on Wired News. We used to call this ego surfing, now I have an ego aggregator. As Steve Gillmor says, aggregators are the new desktop, RSS the format that ties together information flows. We call this information routing. Powerful stuff.

They wanted to include some information in their feed that isn't defined by the RSS spec, so they created an extension, also known as module or namespace, with information about the search results. An aggregator that was tuned to work with Wired search results could use the extra info, but the feed will still work with aggregators that don't know about their namespace (like all the ones out there now). Modularity. Coolness. Marc Canter asked me to keep stressing this point. He was right. People should know that RSS is extensible.

# Posted on 7/23/03; 3:39:45 PM -

David Galbraith: "From a market perspective, surely it would be better if Atom worked around a core of RSS and if need be then the RSS 2.0 core should be amended to include necessary things like the encoding type of content."

# Posted on 7/23/03; 9:35:24 PM -