On the issue of getting updates quickly, there's a new project dedicated to that. It's called Feedmesh, and it's being done on a Yahoo Group, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/feedmesh.
Basically, the idea is to share/distribute new item pings. Most blogging software has the capability to ping services when you post a new item. Sites like blo.gs and weblogs.com currently act as 'clearinghouses' for these pings. The Feedmesh project's goals are to distribute these more, while at the same time concentrating all the pings, so that everybody has access to all available pings. This will lead to faster updates in aggregators as well as decreased bandwidth for content providers.
We do publish a lot of stuff as RSS. All clip blogs have RSS feeds, of the form http://www.bloglines.com/blog/BLOGNAME/rss.
The top links displays also have RSS feeds (see http://www.bloglines.com/rss/{toplinks_inc,toplink s,toplinks_dec}).
And, through the Bloglines API, (see our API section), you can access all of your subscriptions as RSS 2.0 feeds. There are several open-source projects based on the Bloglines API, and several desktop-based aggregators have integrated the API as well.
There are several ways to mitigate the bandwidth issues. First, all aggregators should support gzip compression and the HTTP last-modified and etags headers. That'll take care of a lot of the problems.
The other solution is to get people to use server based aggregators, like Bloglines, which only fetch a feed once per iteration, regardless of how many subscribers there are. As a bonus, there are several things that server-based aggregators can do that desktop based aggregators can't do, like provide personalized recommendations. I like this solution, but of course I'm biased since I'm the founder of Bloglines.:)
Bloglines avoids this problem completely by only fetching a feed once per iteration, regardless of the number of subscribers. We're also able to provide subscriber stats to feed publishers, something that you can't do with desktop aggregators. And no messy software to install.
Our web-based aggregator, Bloglines, is an easy way to try out aggregation. No need to download and install a program. We have a search engine and a list of top RSS feeds to make finding syndicated content easier. See http://www.bloglines.com for more info.
I wonder why they didn't switch to Dan Bernstein's DNS package (djbdns). Like all his code, it's solid as a rock, speedy, and easy to understand. Maybe it's because there's such bad blood between Dan and the BIND guys.
One of the problems with whitelisting is that they are based on email addresses. Most everything in an email message, including the sending email address, can be easily forged. So, if a whitelisting solution becomes popular, all a spammer would have to do would be to forge email so that it looked like it was sent from Amazon or some other large company that regularly sends notification messages.
For better or worse, the only difficult thing to forge in email is the sending IP address. That's why we have blocklists based on IP addresses.
obPlug: My company Trustic is a DNS blocklist based on the shared recommendations of our users.
This illustrates one of the big problems with filters. They will never be perfect, spammers are always adjusting to them (even the Bayesian ones), and the way many are implemented, they make email unreliable (by deleting suspected spam messages and not bouncing them). Blocking untrusted servers by IP address avoids these issues.
Slashdot Mirror
On the issue of getting updates quickly, there's a new project dedicated to that. It's called Feedmesh, and it's being done on a Yahoo Group, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/feedmesh.
Basically, the idea is to share/distribute new item pings. Most blogging software has the capability to ping services when you post a new item. Sites like blo.gs and weblogs.com currently act as 'clearinghouses' for these pings. The Feedmesh project's goals are to distribute these more, while at the same time concentrating all the pings, so that everybody has access to all available pings. This will lead to faster updates in aggregators as well as decreased bandwidth for content providers.
The top links displays also have RSS feeds (see http://www.bloglines.com/rss/{toplinks_inc,toplink s,toplinks_dec}).
And, through the Bloglines API, (see our API section), you can access all of your subscriptions as RSS 2.0 feeds. There are several open-source projects based on the Bloglines API, and several desktop-based aggregators have integrated the API as well.
Hope this helps.
There are several ways to mitigate the bandwidth issues. First, all aggregators should support gzip compression and the HTTP last-modified and etags headers. That'll take care of a lot of the problems. The other solution is to get people to use server based aggregators, like Bloglines, which only fetch a feed once per iteration, regardless of how many subscribers there are. As a bonus, there are several things that server-based aggregators can do that desktop based aggregators can't do, like provide personalized recommendations. I like this solution, but of course I'm biased since I'm the founder of Bloglines. :)
Bloglines avoids this problem completely by only fetching a feed once per iteration, regardless of the number of subscribers. We're also able to provide subscriber stats to feed publishers, something that you can't do with desktop aggregators. And no messy software to install.
Our web-based aggregator, Bloglines, is an easy way to try out aggregation. No need to download and install a program. We have a search engine and a list of top RSS feeds to make finding syndicated content easier. See http://www.bloglines.com for more info.
I wonder why they didn't switch to Dan Bernstein's DNS package (djbdns). Like all his code, it's solid as a rock, speedy, and easy to understand. Maybe it's because there's such bad blood between Dan and the BIND guys.
For better or worse, the only difficult thing to forge in email is the sending IP address. That's why we have blocklists based on IP addresses.
obPlug: My company Trustic is a DNS blocklist based on the shared recommendations of our users.
obPlug: This is why I created Trustic.