RSS Questionaire - Mike Schnoor

Siegried Hirsch recently created a small questionaire concerning the topic of site syndication with RSS. As I wish to contribute to this questionaire, I suggest you will answer the questions on your own – either within his article (in german) or in my blog – where I translated the questions into english. The information provided might help Blogspirit to develop, too.

1. Which sources do you currently use to search for RSS-Feeds?
(Welche Quellen nutzen Sie im Augenblick um nach RSS-Feeds zu suchen?)

2. Which must be offered by a Search-Engine/Directory-Service for RSS-Feeds?
(Was muss eine Suchmaschine/Verzeichnis für RSS-Feeds bieten?)

3. How is the expectance to categorizing?
(Wie sind die Erwartungen an die Kategorisierung?)

4. How important is the completeness of recorded feeds?
(Wie wichtig ist die Vollständigkeit der verzeichneten Feeds?)

5. Should inactive feeds be listed?
(Sollen inaktive Feeds aufgeführt werden?)

6. How important is the possibility to subscribe to a Feed directly?
(Wie wichtig ist die Möglichkeit direkt einen Feed zu abonnieren?)

7. How important is a German feed-directory at all?
(Wie wichtig ist ein deutsches Verzeichnis von RSS-Feeds überhaupt?)

8. What else has to be considered?
(Was wäre sonst noch zu beachten?)

My answers:
1. As sources, I prefer the direct method to accquire feeds by news websites, blogs (of course) and other portals such as Technorati or search engines. I hardly browse Feed-Directories since most of these services are filled with (subjectively) useless feeds. These directories are often unmoderated as they grow in time. A centralized feed directory and not an endless sum of competitors aids the process of keeping up to date with education and information.

2. Search-Engines must offer a clear distinction between commercial (company/corporate) and private feeds. An up to date sample of each feed found by the search engine must be visible before choosing to subscribe to it.

3. The categorization process for a feed may not be limited to a handful of categories since many feeds contain multiple topics and areas to cover. As much as search-engines restrict users, the important entries of a feed may never become visible to a greater audience. For feeds themselves, the idea to categorize the content is highly advisable and should not be forgotten by its author or service provider.

4. Feeds may be distributed completely, but while the number of subscribed-to feeds increases, the download traffic increases, too. To offer teasers or the first paragraph of an entry is as much marketing as newspapers cover with their printed version: The reader is drawn towards the content, and will either decide between reading it or skipping the article while filtering the information by your most personal interest. I offer a limited feed for this blog as not every reader may not be interested in everything.

5. Clearly, an inactive feed should be marked as „inactive for xyz days“, but not completely be removed. This problem occurrs mostly for private feeds created by authors who are indeed able to contribute with world-changing ideas, but might be persecuted by their government in return for their written work.

6. It is very important, and I am not sure how you can not subscribe directly to a feed except if the subscription is moderated by the author(s). But certain people have experienced difficulties with the cut-copy-paste process of URLs. The feed reader software should link to the feeds and automatically catch them. Perhaps a special W3C guideline will aid this process.

7. A German feed is interesting, but not important at all as most German authors who write 7C-content usually distribute their content on a global scape.

8. Free accessability for at least a teaser article of 50 words or more instead of listing only headlines. A central archive for feeds will limit the chance of data loss for the smaller and greater authors, by which even articles of limited or restricted feeds are archived completely. Distribution of RSS Feeds by newspapers. To include Tagging contributes to the connectivity of feeds in order to create a network.