Don't Back Down

I was just reading how kottke.org is down to a single RSS feed. There's another feed for remaindered links, so it's not actually a single feed, but that doesn't matter. It got me thinking anyway.

Some time ago, I did the same thing. I don't know if anyone noticed or not. Traffic didn't ever seem to drop considerably, and if anything, it went up, so I'm guessing that there was little, if any, effect on readers. Of course, I'm sure I don't have even a tiny fraction of the readers of Kottke, so that could be an issue too.

In any case, I don't even remember how long ago it was, but I stopped producing my RSS 1.0 (RDF) feed and simply redirected the old location (index.rdf) to the new location (index.xml), which just so happened to be RSS 2.0. I think the main idea is that very few people reading actually cared which format they were viewing, they just wanted to get at the data. Once it's aggregated, it doesn't really matter much.

As to those who make the argument for the semantic web, well, there may be a point there. There may not. In the case of a syndication feed, you're generally talking about data that changes pretty regularly. Very rarely will you see a feed that contains every post ever made. It's typically the last 6-15 or so. Which means you need someone to collect all that data before it would be useful, because it's not going to be sitting around at some point in the future. So why bother, unless someone is collecting it?

It turns out that at least one person is collecting it. The database at Bloglines just keeps getting bigger. As to the semantic web part of it? Tell Bloglines what you're looking for and it'll find it. The feed may be in RSS 0.91, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 or even Atom. The version of the feed just doesn't seem to matter much anymore. Maybe it never did.

Update: There are actually loads of feeds here - you can subscribe to categories or even to individual entries. But there is only one format for feeds. Hope that didn't confuse anyone.