it’s good to see the rss headline syndication format becoming more prevalent by the week lately. many weblogging tools have added support for creating rss feeds from their weblogs recently and bloghog is the latest aggregation webtool to appear and will show the latest headlines from your favourite weblogs to you.

nothing seems to have changed much in rss since it appeared as part of “my netscape” three years ago though (apart from the fact that my netscape doesn’t seem to work with rss any more that is). headline aggregators still crawl the web at intervals looking for updated feeds. this incessant crawling is driving me nuts, it seems so inefficient, every aggregation tool crawls for its own updates and maintains its own directory of rss feeds.

i’d like to see (in a “haven’t got the time or energy to write at the moment” sense) a combination of blogtracker with bloghog. both tools are only concerned with updates to weblogs but whereas bloghog crawls through all the rss feeds it knows about every hour to see who has updated (and seems to get it wrong quite a lot as of yet) blogtracker uses weblogs.com to figure out which weblogs have updated lately. and weblogs.com know who has updated lately because webloggers tell them via a “ping” method that’s now built into many tools too.

of course you can regard weblogs.com as a central point of failure. if it ceases working then blogtracker and other weblog services that rely on it also fall over like dominos. and if the people who run weblogs.com decide to pull the service entirely but hang onto the domain there are a load of webtools that need recoding to work with a replacement.

it feels like there ought to be something between pull (aka crawling for updates) and push (aka pinging with updates), some kind of unfailing automatic door.