Friday, September 17, 2004 - Posts

a better RSS (and possible killer app solution)

Lately I've been following all the controversy about changes at weblogs.asp.net and the discussions generated by scoble's comments about RSS
and comments in the blogosphere.
I am working on a download manager and BITS - the technology behind automatic updates.
I thought about current RSS readers and came up with a possible solution:

Blogging software
should expose each post as xml file (so could even be used in conjunction with p2p)
should use a good naming convention for posts not to clash with other sites (eg domain name + delimiter + author + delimiter + unique post ID)
should publish RSS feed as slim list of posts with title and link only

RSS Reader (with BITS)
downloads RSS feed file on a schedule and saves it locally with timestamp appended in file name
downloads each link of feed (xml file) and saves it in a local folder(with a unique name), if xml file does not exist in folder
RSS reader loads these locally saved xml files and displays it

Benefits:
content is downloaded once saving lots of bandwidth
load on RSS publishers would be mitigated by BITS (and possibly with help of p2p)

patents pending, obviously, lol :-)