Re: [backstage] A practical use for RSS traffic feeds

[Duncan Barclay]

Hi, I have to agree with you when you say that many of the prototypes here lack a practical use, and will probably not be used in anything (and I include several prototypes I have made in that category).  The only real purpose of many of them is as a challenge, which is always useful, especially to improve programming skills and to generally have fun (One I particularly like is the missing words round one from "Have I Got News For You"). My last 2 prototypes have been an attempt to create something more useful.  The first one being an easy way to get an RSS feed on a website using _javascript_, and the second being an RSS feed of the top news stories from a period of time (it can be found at http://backstage.min-data.co.uk/topstories/ ). I think the main reason the prototypes aren't that useful is that there is only a limited amount of data available at the moment, and you can only do so much with a limited amount of data.  I am sure the backstage team are doing their best to get more stuff available to us, but they are understandably unable to get anything out quickly, as they have to get permission to have them, actually get people to make the feeds (or make them themselves?), and then tell us about them. Good luck with the project you are working on, and it would be nice to see the results. Duncan Chris Walker wrote: Hi, One of the problems I have with the whole RSS 'phenomenon' is simply that it becomes all too quickly an exercise in displaying information with varying degrees of success without actually having much point to it other than an interesting technical exercise in hacking together such feeds with applications like Google Maps & Flickr. That is not to say I don't find the expanding frontiership many on this list and others are engaged in extremely interesting - however I am more interested in the practical and usable applications of such technologies, and I'm sure I am not alone. To that end, I thought I'd give you a heads up of a project that is going live nationwide on 21st June (all things being equal) which combines custom GPS equipped vehicles, Greater London, and the BBC traffic feeds. Each vehicle is required to give a new positional update every 60 seconds, with 'last valid' updates being taken into account every 15 minutes. At the same time, the BBC traffic feeds are monitored by an 'intelligent' algorithm that can match GPS positional updates with reported traffic problems and alert the technical team (it is important for the purposes of this project that these vehicles are moving around). Obviously I can't spell it out as to the nature of the project, but once the holding site goes up, I'll point you in its direction; after the project is completed, we will be releasing the GPS position / traffic RSS matching algorithm, which might be useful to some of you. Regards, Chris.