I’ve been thinking more and more about JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) lately. If you aren’t familiar with JSON here’s some reading:
Unless I see a serious counter argument, I’m ready to jump on the replace XML with JSON boat. Other proposed ideas based on JSON include JSONRequest (a safer version of XMLHttpRequest) and JSON-RPC (like XML-RPC without the XML).
This leads me to my next thought, should the existing feed formats (RSS & ATOM) be replaced with JSON? I’m not 100% sure that this is the right thing, but I’m giving it serious consideration.
The Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) now supports having their ads placed in feeds (RSS, ATOM). It looks like only Movable Type and WordPress are currently supported. Instructions for adding ads to your feeds are provided, but the images they used are barely readable. The WordPress screen shots are bordering on useless they are so difficult to read. Somebody should have caught that before these instructions were posted.
I’ve added the YPN ad feed code to the feeds for this blog to try this out. If these ads work in a reasonable way then Yahoo may have taken a big step forward over Google AdSense by supporting WordPress in addition to Movable Type.
Last week Russell brought up the idea of an RSS only blog. The general idea is to only provide content via a feed instead of the traditional web page method. I think this quickly became an interesting question that wasn’t going to develop in to something particularly useful. Producing something usable wasn’t as important the other ideas that this question spawned and the conversation surrounding it.
The next experiment with blogging and feeds that Russell is trying out is forms in feeds. He took the first logical step, adding a comment form as part of a blog entry in his feed. I tried it out in Bloglines and it seemed to work correctly. There are a few problems that I see with this though.
- Information (like your name, URL and email) can’t be remembered via this method. I suppose there will be some who will see this as a good excuse to extend RSS or ATOM. I don’t think it is worth it.
- Potential for comment spam. Russell moderates all of his comments so it isn’t a huge issue for him. I’ve said it before, if you are going to try something new or develop a new technology, take some time to think about how it can be used for evil. Yes comment spam is evil.
- It may not work in all cases. That might turn out to be a none issue, after all there is nothing stopping people from adding comments the old fashioned way.
I think there is some potential here, although I think a variant of this idea will be more useful. I’d like to see a link that pops up a little comment window. It would work similar to the way the del.icio.us bookmarklet does, it would be able to remember your info, ask some additional info to avoid comment spam and should work in most cases because it simply another link. I should work up a WordPress plugin or something to try out this idea. In the mean time try out Russell’s comment form in his feed and see what you think.