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. |
