I think that currently the best solution is to set up a topic specific feed. A lot of sites already do this, but there is no way to enforce the content.

Finally, a lot of people like the off-topic stuff, as it gives them a better feel of the “community”.

just my two cent’s worth. This is not the first time this subject has come up.

mike chambers

mesh@macromedia.com

Two things:

(1) I couldn’t disagree more. No writer should feel she needs to censor herself just to please the consumers of a downstream feed that aggregates her content.

A couple of my blogs are aggregated by MXNA and the Goog… but they’re also aggregated by Kinja and other non-CF-related services. Those services and people don’t want my feeds stripped of non-CF content.

(2) Categories are nice, but they have problems. As Mike suggests, there is no standard naming convention, and little incentive to enforce one. Beyond that, categories are also limited, since they are used for all sorts of purposes, and aren’t always under the control of the individual user.

Yes, that was basically what I was trying to convey– RSS feeds via category. I know it would be impossible to “police” them, and I don’t think it’s something that should even have to be done, Mostly I just wanted to point-out that it would be helpful if people were to start providing an RSS feed which was topical only. It’s a very easy thing to do.

Roger,

I didn’t mean to sound like someone should censor themselves.. rather they should just use topical RSS feeds.. if they aren’t using one, it would help for them to realize that if they are writing about beanie babies, it will also get posted to the various CF RSS feeds even though it had nothing to do with what the aggregators are created for.

For instance, you wouldn’t post a message to the CF-Talk list at the HouseOfFusion saying you had a job opening when there was a CF-Jobs list for that sort of posting. That’s essentially what I meant by not posting something, not that you should not post altogether.