Alex Barnett: syndicated search and feed access control
“The priorities seem wrong here - I don’t see this step getting us any closer to getting better services when there are other much more fundamental issues that need solving.”
Alex Barnett blog : Syndicated search engines broken - Part II
Alex definitely has a point regarding the state of feed search: as he’s previously pointed out, there is no Google for feed searching. A problem that definitely needs to be solved.
However, I would argue that feed privacy is as important an issue as feed search and that Bloglines priorities are just fine.
The company I work for, having recently rolled out a new website, for the first time is exploring (with no shortage of enthusiasm and support from me) publishing via RSS. Among other things, we’d like to publish some privileged (and in some cases somewhat confidential) content for our partners. We’d love to encourage our readers to subscribe to an RSS feed for marketing news that’s tailored to our dealers and other partners. We could work around the authentication issues, but were one of our subscribers to use their private, authenticated feed in a web-based aggregator even once the data therein would be public.
To be clear, from what I glean from the Bloglines proposal it’s not a complete solution to the problem. Issues such as republication and universality are unresolved. But to my mind, the problem of feed control this is a serious stumbling block in the full usefulness of RSS to the Enterprise space, and a problem that needs a resolution, and I support Bloglines’s efforts as a gesture in the right direction, which is more than anyone else is proposing.
RSS 2
August 2nd, 2006 at 7:29 pm
August 2nd, 2006 at 8:40 pm
Of course we could use https which would protect against sniffing and in combination with http authentication would conceivably limit access to the intended recipient, but once the content has been crawled it would be easily accessible.
We could also encrypt the content itself, but it doesn’t seem like decryption is a commonly available option in aggregators. I’d be happy to hear anything to the contrary.
August 2nd, 2006 at 11:27 pm
Nice to see your blog again btw. I lost you for a long time.
August 2nd, 2006 at 11:51 pm
You know, even if it does little to solve the problem, I think one vendor throwing a solution out there, incomplete though it may be, might be enough to get more industry minds thinking about the problem. You do have a good point, though, regarding the risks inherent in a false sense of security, and that’s possibly a sufficient argument against it. Personally I’m planning on tracking where this concept goes and producing a test feed to play with.
Yeah, I’ve been pretty blog-lazy recently - letting del.icio.us do all my blogging for me. Not very high-quality content, that ;).
August 3rd, 2006 at 8:38 am