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April 27th, 2005
01:53 pm - Reading the top 100
Question of the day: How many of Technorati's Top 100 blogs do you read?
Answer: Six - Engadget, Kottke.org, Joel on Software, Google Blog, Lawrence Lessig and Dan Gillmor.
I'm curious as to what people consider the "important" blogs that they read?
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05:15 pm - Neutrino XML - all your feeds in one file.
I'm pleased1 to announce an idea. If I had been less busy or more organised I might be announcing a product or a technology demonstration, but let's start with the idea: Neutrino XML.
All I have right now is a draft specification for a new kind of xml-based syndication format. I have pretty vague ideas about how to do this kind of thing, so I welcome all and any corrections, suggestions, opprobrium and enthusiasm.
I'll post here the contents of the wiki's front page:
What is Neutrino?
A Neutrino feed is a collection of pointers to other syndication feeds - say, a blog, Flickr and Del.icio.us - all of which belong to one individual. It's essentially indirection for feeds - point someone at your Neutrino feed and they can then discover your blog feed, your Flickr feed, your Del.icio.us feed, and anything else you care to include which you publish and can be syndicated.
Motivation
Many services emit an RSS feed of some kind. People are authoring increasingly many disparate feeds for different reasons. Examples include weblogs (both personal and shared) , bookmarks in Del.icio.us and digital photographs through services like Flickr.com.
There is, at present, no straightforward way to acquire all of a person's feeds from one source. An individual may provide links on a web page to all their feeds, but subscribing to all of these and organising them in an aggregator becomes an increasingly annoying task.
Neutrino was started as a project because the authors felt that there was a need for an "internet calling card" - one file which aggregators could parse periodically to obtain pointers to all the content that a given individual was creating across the web.
Neutrino is not vCard
We wish to make a clear distinction between Neutrino and vCard. vCard is a format for exchanging personal contact information, of the kind that one might not necessarily want public on the internet.
Neutrino, by contrast, is a collection of pointers to other already-public content.
Neutrino is not FOAF
Whilst FOAF bears some similarity to Neutrino, Neutrino is significantly simpler and less prescriptive than FOAF. Whilst FOAF attempts to describe properties of an individual and their entire social network, Neutrino stops at the boundary of the individual.
Benefits of Neutrino
The following benefits are envisioned for wide adoption of Neutrino:
Ease of Subscription
As aggregators adopt Neutrino, it requires a subscription to just one URL in order to begin aggregating all of a person's public content created in syndicated feeds.
Ease of "moving house"
As people move their weblogs and feed URLs change, the individual should update their Neutrino file and aggregators should be able to automatically detect the change and re-point the relevant subscriptions. Broad adoption of Neutrino should eliminate the problem of stale syndication URLs, assuming the Neutrino feed's URL remains stable.
Wiki
There's a wiki over at Neutrinoxml.com. Head on over there and start talking!
1. Or, at least grateful to have relieved my inner pressure to do something with the idea!
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