Curiouser and Curiouser!

New RSS features on topicexchange.com. A minor (but very handy) change to the Internet Topic Exchange today: it now supports ENT (spec), which means suitably equipped aggregators will be able to pull topic information straight out of the RSS feeds.

Making this actually useful is a new RSS feed: all posts on the site. If you want to keep track of everything, subscribe to that one (traffic on the Exchange is still not awfully high, so you won't find yourself overwhelmed). An aggregator which understands topics will be able to just pull down this one RSS feed instead of heaps of individual topic channel feeds.

The most interesting bit is yet to come: I've been contacted by Scott Johnston and Greg Gershman, who both seem interested in using Topic Exchange information to do some sort of classification of search results. Sort of like the way Google uses dmoz to give you links to relevant categories when you search. This functionality is yet to come, but the hooks are there in the Topic Exchange, so any developers are welcome to start using them from now on!

For people who are interested in using this, I've written a page to explain how to handle the data. Enjoy!

Comment

[Second p0st]

This is fantastic news.  Well done Phil!

Just came across a link to:

OML: Outline Markup Language

which is an attempt to create a validatable XML language for describing outlines.  It's simple and, as you would expect, very similar to OPML.  Key differences are:

• The use of a tag in the section to allow generalized meta data to be used there.
• The provision of an optional tag to contain an nodes contents (rather than packing it into a text attribute)
• The provision of an optional tag for use in an node.

It is this last that is key to OML since the use of multiple tags can replace the use of custom attributes within the node.  It is these custom attributes which can prevent OPML from being validated.  They also make it inconvenient to use tools based upon DTD or schema when editing OPML documents (to which I can attest).

A while back I came across instructions for what you need to put into an RSS feed to tell readers that it has moved to a new location (URI).  But, for the life of me, I can't find it now.  Does anyone know what I'm talking about?  I'm reasonable sure I didn't imagine it.

Update: Terry Frazier came up with the answer.  Thanks Terry.

ask.yahoo.com RSS beta. Ask Yahoo!, a daily column that features Q&A with Yahoo!'s expert team of Surfers, is now syndicating its content via RSS. Here's the link to the RSS file:

[Michael J. Radwin's blog]

Hey hey -- some RSS action from Yahoo -- subscribe now so they know we're out here! [Brain Off]

I've subscribed, sight unseen.  Now wouldn't this be a great feed to have topics?  So you could see the Q&A that really mattered to you.  And Yahoo! already have a taxonomy.