Having had feed annotation streams brought to mind recently, I was thinking today about a machine tag processor that could be used to augment feeds from a service like delicious via some form of tag based programming.
For example, the geo:lat= machine tagging convention allows you to add geo-data to bookmarked items in services like delicious:
The Open University in the West Midlands : Home
ou region ouregion region=04 geo:lat=52.4601 geo:long=-1.9449 geotagged
(In this example, I further use the "geotagged" tag to identify resources I have geotagged.)
A form of perfomative tagging could then be used to invoke automatic feed annotation - in a sense, I guess the geotagged tag could be used to trigger a geo-annotation service that mines the informal tags of a bookmarked resource for geo: machine tags, and then augments the original feed with the correct geoRSS elements.
Alternatively, just passing the feed through a feed annotation service might cause it to be inspected for machine tags that can trigger feed annotations directly.
This augmented (annotated) feed could then be piped straight into a Google map, for example, to allow the feed items to be displayed directly on a map.
Another useful feed annotation service might be to identify a bookmarked resource as a multimedia file to trigger the annotation of the feed by adding an enclosure tag that could deliver the multimedia item as a payload. This could be done in a couple of ways, for example by virtue of an appropriate filetype suffix (e.g. mpg) or an automatically added mime:type=audio/mpeg machine tag.
(Do any social bookmarking services add mime-type machine tags to bookmarked resources? I wonder how useful it might be if they also did autodiscovery and popped and feeds or microformats that were duly discovered into a feed:url= machine tag...?)
Feed annotations could also be applied pre-emptively to feeds passed through the service: for example, given the bookmarked URL of a youTube movie page, it's easy enough to create the URL for a Flash movie enclosure for that resource.
So what would my feed annotation processor ("feed annotator") do? Well, for starters it would:
- accept an RSS feed, e.g. of resources on delicious;
- inspect each item;
- process machine tags appropriately (e.g. add appropriate geoRSS elements on finding geo: machine tags);
- add enclosure tags based on heuristics (e.g. file suffix, URL (youTube page etc)).
This is the sort of thing I'd like to be trivially able to do in Yahoo! Pipes, but I can't think offhand how to do it?
Maybe Popfly or the new Google Mashup Editor (any invites going for the latter??? ;-) could be used to implement this sort of functionality easily...?
Posted by ajh59 at June 1, 2007 12:57 AM