Which is the preferred feed?

[Bob Wyman]

Some sites are beginning to serve their feeds via intermediaries like FeedBurner. They are doing this, in part, to make it easier for them to get better statistics on their use of the feeds, to off-load bandwidth requirements, or to take advantage of the advertising insertion and management programs of the intermediaries. However, many of today’s intermediaries require that program participants manage a “base” feed on their own sites that is later copied to the intermediary. This is the approach taken by FeedBurner among others. Whether or not the intermediaries require that a feed be maintained on the site, this is usually required if only because there will be people who are reading the feed and there is no means to notify them, within the feed, that a new “preferred” source of the feeds is available. For instance, the Typepad site blog.deeje.tv has two feeds generated by Typepad:   http://blog.deeje.tv/musings/atom.xml http://blog.deeje.tv/musings/index.rdf   and it has a feed generated by FeedBurner:   http://feeds.feedburner.com/deeje/musings   Now, my assumption is that the owner of blog.deeje.tv probably would prefer that people read his FeedBurner feed rather than the TypePad feeds. Evidence of this can be seen in that the autodiscovery links on the page point to the FeedBurner feeds. However, while the links currently point to FeedBurner, they have not always pointed there… At some point in the past, the owner of this blog decided to prefer the FeedBurner service over Typepad for feed services. At some point in the future, the same owner might wish to drop the FeedBurner service in favor of some other service – or perhaps just go back to Typepad normal feeds. The problem, of course, is that there is no existing mechanism by which these changes in preferred feeds can be indicated in either an Atom or RSS file. The result is that any software system that started reading the Atom or RDF feeds provided by Typepad before this blog started using FeedBurner will continue to read the Typepad feeds in the future. Similarly, any system currently reading the FeedBurner feeds is likely to continue reading those feeds in the future. One could argue that feed reading software should, on some regular schedule, re-scan the “alternate” site for a feed to see if the autodiscovery links have changed. However, this is a pretty crude solution… It would be much, much better to allow a feed to contain data that explicitly identifies a “preferred” alternative source. Supporting a means to identify a “preferred” alternative source would greatly improve the mobility of feeds across the network and would avoid the current problem of potentially pinning someone down to a feed delivery service simply because of historical accident. If I want to move my feeds from Typepad to FeedBurner, I should be able to without having to worry about leaving behind everyone who had ever started reading my Typepad feeds. Similarly, if I later decide that I want to move off FeedBurner, there should be a way to point people to the location of my preferred feeds.   bob wyman