At long last I decided to send the email which I had been storing in my draft for the last 2 months. Since we started syndicating RSS 1.0, I had thought about sending out the email to the alpha bloggers and getting the word out to the bloggerosphere that way. Now its starting to happen.

I got a email back from David Weinberger, saying wow! Thanks (I blogged it.).

One from Dave Winer saying,

RSS 2.0 actually does have an item-level pubDate element.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss#ltpubdategtSubelementOfLtitemgt

Anyway, glad to see you getting into syndication in all those languages.

In reply to Dave I wrote.

We were comparing RSS 0.91 against RSS 1.0 because http://www.bbc.co.uk/news are currently syndicating RSS 0.91 and we didn’t want to just follow there lead.


RSS 2.0 was talked about too, but we felt that RSS 1.0 with its RDF base was more suited for us, as we could convert 1.0 to 2.0 without loosing any data. With that in mind, we are able to bring in RSS 2.0 at any point in the future.


I'm honestly just glad we are able to syndicate in so many languages, and hope this encourages others (small and large) to publish multiple language rss. As RSS should not be tied to Latin based languages.

I also recieved a very thought provoking reply from Bob DuCharme.

Very cool, congratulations, and cheers for going with RSS 1.0.


Once enough stories accumulate, would the new entries be bumping the old ones out of the feed files, as most do, or are there any ideas about making archives of the entries available? I've ranted a bit about how archived RSS from anyone would be a tremendous contribution to a semantic web, while I still can't see any use cases for transient RSS in a semantic web. (Useful nevertheless, obviously, but just not in any semantic web contexts.)

Honestly, I replied. I have never really thought about archiving RSS. At the moment we do not archive our indexes for worldservice sites. That may change, but its a very interesting thought none the less.

And of course, I got some nice emails back from BBC staff who saw David Weinberger's blog saying great work. I'm hoping to send another one out to boingboing, ntk, slashdot, theregister, etc once we get our help pages up and running. But before that I will keep a track of what happens in the bloggerosphere using my uncrafted rss feeds from Daypop and Feedster. At the moment its a bit of echo chamber.

I wont talk about why we choose RSS 1.0 over RSS 2.0 right now, but this is a interesting view on the debate. By the way, please check out the RSS feeds which are, lets say full of metadata. For example here is the caribbean feed.

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