Archive | 2003

WSJ: Web Allows People Like You And Me to Spot Trends. Uh-Oh.

Lee Gomes in the Wall Street Journal’s Portal column posits that the web allows us to spot trends, “disintermediating” the trend setters and trend spotters. I’ve always felt that online forums (CompuServe, Wikis, bulletin boards) could give you more of a sense of the market, the “what’s the man on the street opinion” but accumulators and search engines can turn this from an informal survey to a statistical analysis.

RSS as a web service, XSL transforms for the different dialects?

I like the idea of RSS as a web service. For slower, close-enough-to-real-time news feeds such as the FoxPro feeds I’m hosting at http://www.tedroche.com/RSSFeeds.html, hourly refreshes are good enough. For more of an on-demand site such as Amazon, with thousands of different requests, real-time response via and XML web service transformed to an RSS feed is the right answer.

Now, is there a way to transform the RSS 2.0 feeds that I’m producing to display the other dialects of RSS that a requestor might be interested, such as 0.91, 0.92 or 1.0? Or is there a core commonality that I could produce and then transform (on the fly through XSL, or more programmatically) to generate the desired feed? I don’t want to discourage traffic by not providing information in the format requested. I’ve already run into one aggregator site that was interested in 1.0 only.

Here are some clues a Google search gave me:

radio.weblogs.com/0100887/stories/ 2002/03/18/anXsltTutorial.html

http://www.ecommnet.co.uk/articles/bloggerRDF.asp

Here’s the opposite effect, consuming different RSS feeds via XSLT:

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/01/02/tr.html

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