FeedFire recently launched a service that allows anyone to create RSS feeds about any page. This is a great idea and one that many companies might be able to use. Conceptually, this is about transforming HTML pages to RSS feeds, a concept wrought with parsing issues and may result in brittleness. But the more important issue [in my view] is RSS quality.

RSS feed quality is rarely discussed, but I think FeedFire (and other solutions like it) represent real threats to the benefits we've come to know and depend on with content syndication. Measuring quality is also difficult and there are no standardized metrics for doing so, but it warrants deeper reflection in my view.

In the specific case of FeedFire being applied to something like a home page, all links on the harvested page become items in the feed. Imagine the problems of adding a JavaScript link to an RSS feed - the link simply won't work. Including items like “Send a Release / Article Link” in a feed violates every premise of syndication. The benefits of syndication is that it calls out specific (discrete) items that are new and relevant so that consumers are aware of something new. Secondly, a feed is *about* something – the transformation of a home page is not about *anything* specific like new releases, new product announcements, etc.

While I like what FeedFire has created, and while I believe it’s a good solution for a narrow range of use cases, the issues cited above compel me to conclude that in many cases, poor feed quality will be the result and careful consideration should be employed in every situation where HTML pages serve as the source for syndicated formats.

The downside of not paying close attention to the goal of creating high-quality RSS feeds include (but are not limited to):

• Crappy feeds have the possibility of bringing useless content into a newsreader—this could be seen as a form of RSS spam.
• Unlike e-mail spam, at least this form of RSS spam requires our permission; i.e., if you don't subscribe to it, you don't receive it. - thus, while it may seem less insidious than e-mail spam, it points out the possibility of RSS spam tactics evolving to something different but just as insidious—diluting the world of useful RSS feeds with a glut of crappy feeds. While this would not harm those sites that only surface useful feeds, it could render RSS public search engines nearly useless.

Disclaimer - I'm not trying to beat up on FeedFire. I'm just pointing out the possibility that people might use this service in ways that are detrimental to the overall exerience of syndication. I'm sure they're fine folks with excellent technical skills.

If you were a newsmaster, what are some of the things you'd have to be concerned with when creating, managing, and hosting syndicated documents? In this particular post I'm tilting heavily toward RSS requirements for news syndication purposes, however, I recognize that newsmastering may encompass many activities (like news research) before reaching a point where these requirements become important.

Here's my list of RSS hot buttons, but send me your ideas too.

• I would want to stage and test the feeds before going live.
• I would want to make sure the feeds are always running and valid.
• I would want to make sure the links in them actually work.
• I would want to be able to look at the historical state of the feed at any point in the past.
• I would want to know how well a feed resonates with my audience (even links to pages for which I have no server logs for).
• I would want to know if there are any misspelled words in the feed.
• I might want to splice items from other channels at certain times, or under certain conditions.
• I might want to register them (automatically) with semantic search engines.
• I would want all flavors of syndication formats to be available without doing any additional work.
• I might want a synopsis briefing of what’s in my feeds from time to time.
• I might want automatic language translation of feeds to Spanish.
• I would want a single dashboard for monitoring all feeds that I'm responsible for.
• I would want a feature that spots and notifies of unfavorable words, phrases, and terms in the feeds.
• I would want to review disclaimer and copyright notices in all feeds.
• I might also want to control them from my dashboard. I would want high Google visibility for the feeds.
• I would want to provide a unified view of all feeds so that users could find them and subscribe to them.
• I would want to be able to leverage any content from any departmental Web group and transform it into RSS.
• I would want to control feeds for performance and caching objectives.

There are lots of tools that address various items in this requirements list, but no single tool or platform is available for the role of NewsMaster. This will change of course, but in the meantime, keep the duct tape handy. ;-)