I realize that some day we’ll have Atom extensibility worked out; however, I need to add some stuff to an Atom 0.3 feed now and would like some advice on doing it properly and in a fashion that has a chance of being compatible with Atom v1.0. Please bear with me…

What we’d like to do is augment entries that we put in our compound feeds by adding  “metric” information that can be used by aggregators to sort, select, etc. For instance, at http://pubsub.com/linkranks.php we compute a “LinkRank” for blogs based on the pattern of incoming links that they get. We’ve been asked by a number of aggregator developers to insert this rank into the entries that we publish so that they can be used in sorting, selecting, etc.

There are other metrics that we could add as well – various measures of activity, popularity, relevance to specific topic areas, classifications, etc. But, LinkRanks will be the first we deal with.

We’re currently thinking that we’d like to add elements like the following to the entries that we republish:

 

<ps:metric scheme=”ps:LinkRank”>27</ps:metric>

            This would indicate that the feed had a LinkRank of 27.

 

            <ps:metric scheme=”ps:classification”>politics</ps:metric>

            This would indicate that our classification engine believes that the entry is discussing “politics”. This would not replace any user specified “category” data.

 

            Would the encoding shown above be appropriate for use in feeds? Do you think it will end up being compatible with whatever the Atom V1.0 extensibility rules end up being? If not, can you suggest a better encoding? Also, if you think this makes sense, could you suggest some metrics that you would like to see inserted into entries by in-channel processors like PubSub.com?

 

                        bob wyman

 

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