The Future of RSS

Scoble asks what we want to see next from RSS. I'll tell you what I want, and I'd love to be able to have the time to make it happen myself.

I want a new type of RSS, and I'd call it RSE (pronounced Rizzy), or Really Simple Events. It would be a method for anyone, anywhere, to publish a feed that has events in it. Then, I'd have a RSE Aggregator that would work just like an RSS Aggregator, only it would be a calendar. I'd be able to pull in feeds from user groups, appointments, online conferences, web meetings, chats, co-workers, etc, and be able to pull them into my RSE Aggregator to see when they are. I'd like to be able to have an interface to be able to add events simple, and have the underlying RSE generated automatically. I'd like to be able to publish this information to the web, and have people pull up my RSE feeds and see what I have going on. I'd like to be able to have a company RSE feed to show product releases, trade show appearances, webcasts, appointments, and other info.

I'd like to be able to integrate RSE with Outlook, and have Outlook push and pull RSE feeds, and have them automatically show up in my Outlook calendar (and consequently my PDA). No, I'm not talking shared calendars with Exchange 2003. I'm talking decentralized calendars here. I'd like to be able to have my own personal Pingback port where people can push events to me, and I can approve or deny them. I'd like to have RSE and RSS in the same document, with an RSE extension that lets me tie important dates to blog entries. I'd like to be able to export my list of calendar feeds to OPML or OPML-like syntax.

That's about everything I can thing of right now. So, who is gonna build it for me?

7 Comments

  • I do like RSE as well:)

    But who can make it?

  • check out upcoming.org ..

  • That's realy nifty, but what I want is a modification of RSS designed for calendars, not an RSS calendar feed. RSS has issues with parsing dates that makes it not the best candidate in the world.



    Also, time zone issues would need to be addressed, which the RSS format does not allow for. I don't think an RSS module is the best solution. I think a new format would be.

  • Julien,



    The Event Module is still flawed, because it does not allow you to specify start times, end times, or durations. It also does not handle time zones, or an aggregator that will calculate the actual start time from your time zone. It's only a partial solution.



    I'll be interested to see what MyBlogtoll.com does. Somehow, if it uses the Event module, I fear it will not do what RSE would conceivably do.

  • RSS 2.0 allows namespaces. Create an events namespace with the properties you need (start time, end time, duration, whatever). So, it has the extra properties for your RSE aggregator app, but it can also be read just fine by today's RSS apps.

  • Funny! I was thinking of the same thing just yesterday.

  • Robert, I don't quite get your critisism of the Events module.



    With

    <ev:startdate>2003-11-12T14:00:00+0</ev:startdate>

    <ev:enddate>2003-12-14T18:00:00+0</ev:enddate>

    I can specify both time of day, time zone, and - indirectly - duration, can't I?



    But these are generally physical events - I don't need to know the exact time, unless I'm there - so defaulting to local time seems sensible.

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