Feeds of Feeds

There doesn't seem to be many rules/conventions governing what you get when you request a feed representing the on-going results from a search. For example at the botton of a Google Blog Search page you can get an RSS or Atom feed with 10 or 100 items. With Technorati you can add a search to your Watchlists and then get an RSS feed. In Bloglines you can subscribe to a search but you never see the feed itself - or at least if you try to edit the subscription you don't.

However I am more interested in the feed itself. They all work fine if all you want to do is subscribe to them in a news reader, but what if you want to process the results further? Such feeds supply the necessary <link rel="alternate" type="type="text/html" ... but couldn't they also supply the associated third-party feed itself?

Consider the simple example of looking for 'geotagged' blog entries: its easy enough to get a set of references to blog entries which match the search engines idea of 'geotagged'. But if you want to go further and retrieve the associated location (if any) then its easier to deal with the blog's feed than it is its HTML representation.

Could this be handled by including some additional <link> with either a suitable rel attribute or infer it from the type attribute?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

SmartLink

A Review of hReview

Speculations about developing with iCloud