Feed Feeds

Feeds have become an important information channel on the Web, but the management of feed metadata has so far received little attention. It is difficult for feed consumers to locate, evaluate, and share feeds as well as manage feed subscriptions across multiple platforms. It is also difficult for feed publishers to categorize and present more than a few feeds in an effective manner.

We are proposing a web-based service to address some of these problems. The service will manage feed metadata and will allow any number of interfaces to be built on it. For example, there will be an interface for feed consumers that will enable them to manage their feed subscriptions in one location. There will also be an interface for feed producers to categorize and publish their feeds.

The service will manage feeds using feeds. For example, one’s feed subscriptions will be represented as entries in a “subscriptions” feed. Interaction with the system therefore will be based on the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub), an established API.