After seeing the shenanigans that go on with feeds in general, I can fully understand why you’d have abandoned your own. What I don’t understand is why you seem to be such a masochist as to have done it repeatedly.

The more I look at all the minor variations and the organic growths that have attached themselves to RSS, the mare I think “that can wait until someone wants it”. There are a LOT of interesting ideas that people have implemented to try to ease their own burdens, but so much seems to be poorly documented, invalidly specified, or both. I think I’ve currently got a happy medium (or at least a lowest common denominator) to pull and store basic info, but anything fancy will definitely need to wait for later.

Looking at my own MP3 and OGG collection, I have to admit that I’m guilty of poor tagging myself. AND I’m really bad about personal backups. Man, you’ve pegged me, along with most of the rest of the world. View all comments by emag

Anyone who thinks the Semantic Web has a chance of succeeding needs to take a realistic look at how badly people implement even simple data formats in the real world. RSS should be a simple thing. It isn’t. Now throw some weirdo first-order logic and design-y RDF knowledge representation yadda-yadda stuff I don’t understand where your inference capabilities are only as strong as the weakest link in the data sources you’re integrating, and you’re setting yourself up for failure, as I see it.

People, even smart people, often cannot produce quality data or quality metadata. Their MP3 collections are poorly tagged, they don’t back up their precious files, they don’t even have complete albums for their digital music. That is the simple truth. View all comments by Warren Henning