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FinancialContent is using the RSS <category> element as the basis for a spec expressing information useful to financial analysts. Dave says he hasn't seen this approach before, but look at the RSS 2.0 spec, the category element has a stock symbol under a financial news site's domain as an example! So the novel part might be someone actually publishing a spec about this.

This seems like an excellent way to extend RSS. If the form of the <category> element can possibly express what you need, why prevent your feed from being intelligently handled by all the existing category-aware aggregators? Compatibility is courteous.

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Dave has an interesting story:

The first clue that something weird was happening at Microsoft around RSS was when Sean Lyndersay picked me up for dinner on the first night of my visit. I asked what part of Microsoft he worked for. He said he was on the RSS Team. I gulped. You mean there's an RSS Team at Microsoft? Yeah there is.

Update: You know what's ridiculous? CNET publishing this story about Dave's scoop. The story is inferior to Dave's post in every way: longer, less informative, uncontextualized, less fun to read, and surrounded by ads. Yet it contains only a tiny excerpt and one nearly-invisible link to Dave's story. Since Dave is the source, why not just link prominently and quote without worthless wholesale paraphrasing?

I know. The answer has something to do with the reporter's training and other cultural experience in a medium that rewards novelty, where scoops and angles made sense.

This sort of writing is not useful anymore. Writers, figure this out.

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Something to look at when we get around to adding various API support to frassle. Found on the excellent Tucows Developer blog, The Farm.

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Probably a spec worth learning about.

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Looks like photo album service Flickr and the syndication wizards at FeedBurner are teaming up to develop a standard for including photo attributes in a feed. Excellent!

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Perl code to do RSS autodiscovery. This is exactly what I need to add one-click subscribe to frassle's aggregator.

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Steve Gillmor has some interesting ideas for trust-based aggregation. A similar vision to frassle's.

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A google search turned up this tool which will allegedly use Amazon's SOAP API to get your wishlist and return it in RSS. But it doesn't seem to work for me.

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Amazon offers syndicated feeds for various categories of products. Why not also offer RSS feeds of my wishlist or my personalized recommendations? Or of my order history? I would really like to keep track of and republish what I like, and it would be just plain useful to keep some of my friends' wishlists around— so I can stay apprised of their interests as well as quickly find gifts.

Update: I sent the following message to Amazon.com suggestions:

I love your new RSS feeds! But I think you could do one better by offering personalized RSS feeds. Why not give me an RSS feed of my wishlist? I could easily republish my wishlist on my weblog, showing visitors my interests. I could also subscribe to RSS feeds for my friends' wishlists, so I can easily give them gifts. It's a win-win: customers get better ways to follow along with each others' interests, and Amazon.com offers an omnipresent impulse buying option. It will only further cement Amazon's position as the definitive store—where you link when you want to talk about a product.

Good work!

Shimon Rura