The RSS Web We Weave

I ran across this just now. I'm not sure that it is something that I would use as I tend to just use my brain to filter out crap I don't want to read (hence, I don't click on it). However, I have mentioned here before that I'm a fan of AideRSS. As I thought about it some more, I guess you could called AideRSS a kind of filter. By using AideRSS, I depend on "the community" to filter out some crap for me.

What made me write this post however, was thinking about how many levels of indirection an RSS feed might pass through by the time I read it. Using my own feed as an example, I write it on Blogger, then I "burn" it with FeedBurner. There's one. Then, someone might use AideRSS to get out my "best" posts. There's two. Next, they might run it through FeedRinse to cleanse out the content they find objectionable. There's three. Now, that it's clean, they might do God knows what with it after running it through Yahoo Pipes. There's four. And that is before they even see it in their aggregator, which may have another set of tags, virtual folders, or searches. Wow....

The Windows guys won't get this, but those whole idea just parallels so well with the philosophy of the *nix operating system.

Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
Write programs to work together.
Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.