2or3things

Blastfeed: Enriched RSS management platform

Today it is a fact. RSS has become the ‘de facto’ standard for information syndication on the web. And this as a more than reasonable consequence of the read/write web powered by blogs.
The proliferation of information sources pointed out the need for an easy way to collect all this information and this led to the different RSS specifications.

RSS is based on XML which makes it on the one hand “standard” (many tools and libraries are available that can handle RSS) and on the other hand very flexible. You can enrich the language set to add new concepts to better define the semantics of the content. This is not possible for instance with a relational model, once you have your model you must stick with it. If you want to achieve the required flexibility you have to use very open relational schemas based on key-value tables that will perform very poorly as the amount of data to be treated grows.

The problem though is that today there does not seem to be an efficient platform to persist and retrieve XML because of its hierarchical structure and its flexibility. But that flexibility is what makes RSS extremely useful. XML has been mainly used as an easy way to exchange information between applications, but the messages are not usually persisted (actually they are in some cases, like messaging systems for recovery, but not for adding any value to them).

In my mind, the next step is to define a set of new standards that are based on RSS to syndicate all sorts of content. We already have the itunes namespace for podcasts, but I think new specifications for syndicating other kind of content like product listings (example), TV listings, events, jobs, etc will soon become available. We can call it ERSS, for Enriched RSS.

As more and more ERSS content is available on the web, on the intranets, etc. a platform capable of loading, querying, notifying and redistributing ERSS content is a must.

That’s why at 2or3things we have built Blastfeed. The underlying technology is 100% native XML, which allows Blastfeed to process any ERSS feed, query it and repurpose it as requested by the user. That way you have a central ERSS platform to manage all your RSS feeds, filter them, reuse them, notify based on ERSS contents, etc. The blastfeed website is just an example application on top of the platform we have built. The platform can be deployed in intranets to manage internal and external RSS feeds and help getting all the information distributed across your company.