Changes to RSS to make mapping easier

As part of my mapping experiment I had to parse through HTML and determine by heuristics which link was the RSS feed for the particular URL etc. There were two problems with this:

• Determining if the link was a RSS file: naming conventions vary widely, any chance we could all agree to use .rss as the extension?


• Extend the RSS schema to include referrals as part the schema. This would allow very fast mapping of blog relationships.

These two changes would allow blogs to be machine mappable without the current crufty coding required to walk through HTML files. This should lead to lots of unintended consequences....