Recently there was much hullabaloo about “quoteblogs” which seem to be defined as a blog that just takes a whole post from another blog and reprints it. (See Quoteblogs vs. Linkblogs and Quoteblogs follow up for background…)
So in a comment to this post by Scoble about the quoteblog, I started to think about how I’d do it, using the data found in Atom feeds… I said:
Well, in Atom feeds, you can create a summary for each post (it’s an optional element.) This summary, which is typically a brief one or two line description of the full post, would be ideal to use in Robert’s situation. Actually, in my own RSS 2.0 feed I use the description element in this way, with the full post in a content:encoded element. I think Atom has an advantage here, because you could easily use the summary if it exists, and if not, create a summary from the content element if that exists… Of course if none of those exist, you can always use the title, which is required in Atom. In RSS I don’t think it’s quite as clear what the description will contain…
(Yes, I just quoted my comment, in full, from Robert’s blog… how’s that for adding to the confusion!)
Anyway, I’m tossing this out there… A mockup of an Experimental Atom Quote Blog.
I’ve grabbed a few Atom feeds I subscribe to, and pretty much did what I outlined above. the data for each post comes from the associated Atom feed. You can pretty easily map the element of each item to it’s corresponding piece in the feed. Granted, this is a small sampling, as I didn’t create working code (yet) I just did some copy/paste work here…
I did attempt to use blockquote and cite properly, and display the copyright if one existed… I think Atom lends itself well to such use. I honestly don’t know about RSS. I’m sure it could be done, but I didn’t feel like it was a worthwhile exercise for me, YMMV…