April 19, 2005

Politeness Tag for RSS?

off-topic

Perhaps there should be a "politeness" revisit tag for RSS?

For example, if I have feeds that are set to update every night at midnight, there is no reason for people to request it every hour.

Needless requests are a burden on bandwidth and server response time. Eventually, what is bad for the provider will be bad for the reader, in the form of services that are scaled back are removed altogether.

This might not apply to blogs like this one, where (1) there is one feed, or few feeds (2) a new entry could happen at any time. I am thinking of services with thousands of specialty feeds, or an unlimited number of custom feeds.

Now, I know the META Revisit-After tag is not used in any meaningful way, but I think that is because the relationship between content publishers and search engines is often distant and adversarial.

In contrast, the relationship between RSS publishers and RSS readers is direct and cooperative. Why not have more tools to better manage this relationship?

Or is there already something like this?

the ideal scenario:

* Publisher has the option to set a frequency cap on feed requsts.

* Reader software sees the tag and respects the frequency cap. Of course, they are free to request the feeds less often.

* Abuse, defined as requests in excess of the frequency cap, is no longer ambigous. Hopefully, this leads to less unintentional abuse.

* Considering the sluggish response time of services like Bloglines, they might appreciate a more efficient distribution of resources, too.

Comments?

Politeness Tag for RSS? (1)
Posted by Sean O'Rourke on April 19, 2005 at 10:23 AM
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Comments

Posted by Sean O'Rourke at April 20, 2005 8:15 AM