Options for Newscasting
We don't encourage using RSS, in PSYC end users do not poll for news by themselves. They receive a realtime multicast from the news station as soon as there is news. So all you need to do is enter/subscribe newscast rooms (pubsub paradigm).
The question is only, how do we get the information into the newscast room so it can multicast it? Here are your options:
Straight PSYC newscasting instead of polling
What to do when you'd like to have a certain newsfeed in PSYC: Tell your news provider to generate notifications directly in PSYC, see Wikinotify for an example how to do that. It's hugely simpler and better as you can see.
Only one polling station in PSYCspace
If that is not an option, look into the list of public Newsfeeds to see if your newsfeed is already being multicast somewhere.
If that is not the case, you can either ask someone who is running such a public server to install it for you, or you can run a server yourself, then Create Places that poll RSS files for changes, then convert them to a decent PSYC multicast.
- <lynX> In fact this should all be automatic.. look at http://www.euronews.net/services/rss/ for example.. aggregators like netvibes simply use the URL as feed identifier. They can then provide thousands with the news from an RSS and only have one process polling it. PSYC could be beyond centralized aggregators since it has non-centralized distribution, but it makes sense to have a way to map feed URLs to PSYC entities, not be limited to just nicknames the way Twitter is. One or several mapping services could be useful that map your RSS feed URL to a suitable entity – maybe even installing it on the fly if not available as yet. This could also be implemented using a DHT if PSYC had such an extension.
RSS: Real Complicated and Bandwidth-Intensive Syndication
- <Monkey> I'm not so interested in normal newsfeeds as friend feeds... What I want is a way to keep up on every friend's blog in a nice and easy way.
That's when the RSS principle is the least effective, because updates happen relatively rarely and the polling traffic yields a lot less results then it does with a fast news source. Alright, a lot of people have given up worrying about bandwidth, so go ahead and install your RSS thing (see also Newsfeeds).
But the real plan for a better future is to convince your friends to provide for realtime PSYC notifications. Software lists at least wikinotify and phpbb syndication as software solutions to integrate PSYC into forums and wikis. We need more people to adapt all the blog engines.
- <Monkey> I can write plugins for Drupal and Wordpress, those two are modular PHP systems. My home page uses drupal and I have a lot of experience with that package in particular.
- <el> There is a notification plugin for MovableType in the perlpsyc distribution. Maybe it does not work with the latest version of the blog, I will look at that when my semester is over.
You are super-invited to do so! ;) I can see psycnotify is similar to trackback ping, as both transmit headlines, so you can dig directly into that part of the code.
See also activity streams, crypto sharing and social networking stuff in general.
XML RPC Pings and Soaps
I have updated http://www.psyced.org/dist/world/net/place/news.c to accept http://www.xmlrpc.com/weblogsCom style XML-RPC pings, so it may fetch its RSS only when getting a realtime wake-up call instead of going idiotic periodic. The SOAP variant, as ridiculously ugly as it is, is also supported.
- TODO: I will document how to set up a place with ping reception, here.
TrackBack
Also I found out that the blog community has developed a much smarter protocol called TrackBack. It uses POST requests compatible to your average HTML FORM, which is nice and compact. Will have to look into its potential. psyced may just be the smartest platform for HTTP messaging, as it is a communications server, not a webserver. They seem to have a SPIM problem however. Maybe we can help.
- <Monkey> Trackbacks and blog comments in general have a huge SPIM problem. Wordpress and other blogging platforms seem to have dealt with it to an extent by implementing filtering plugins that attempt to statistically identify spam. The big problem with blog comment spam is the fact that it's typically un-authenticated and it is undesirable to have your blog comments authenticated because it discourages the legitimate commenters. This is definitely an area that needs improvement.
This could be addressed using the web of trust. See Trust#Application for a possible plan on how to deal with this.
Even e-mail alerts are better than RSS
Another way to go about it is to have your friends send you realtime notifications by email, then you can have procmail parse those mails and launch psycmail to deliver the links to you.
No wait, we can do better than that: You just let them send e-mail to #placename@psyced.org or whatever other server has net/smtp listening on SMTP port 25, then we forward those emails to the named place and it can even do specific parsing before publishing the change into its castmsg(), or relaying it privately to you.
What about a standardized format to go with it, like headline in the Subject: (without optional leading [listname]) and link in a X-URL: header field. Body ignored.
Blogging in psyced
And then there is still the possibility to use psyced itself as a blog engine. Unfortunately the blog functionality is very rudimentary, but maybe if you're interested... you can turn on #define THREADS when creating a blog place. Since it is unfinished, the documentation is the source, currently.
- See also related talk in Authentication.
Web Video Feeds
This is pretty cool: Check out democracy Player from ParticipatoryCulture.org
- Monkey 09:50, 26 July 2006 (CEST)> We should definitely work on a way to integrate this with psyc ;)
Twitter gateways
See Twitter for psyced's polly service.
Bayeux: A JSON Protocol For Publish/Subscribe Event Delivery
<Monkey> I found this link on an evil buzzword compliant weblog (ajaxian.) I think that it deserves a link here at about.psyc: http://svn.xantus.org/shortbus/trunk/bayeux/bayeux.html
More useful than RSS/Atom
See Notification about nice ideas on how to make smarter news update formats than the current popular standards.