indieWIRE RSS Flood

Been up to my armpits in RSS today, as we quietly launched the first phase of a multi-phase new contextual system for indieWIRE. The first slice today launched over 330 RSS feeds -- a format we've been quietly using for over a year -- off of the first chunk of that context database: films and distributors that we've tracked in our box office data (nearly a year worth's of data now.) That means if you want an RSS feed just for Sony Pictures Classics, or IFC Films, or "The Passion of the Christ", or "Latter Days" ... we've got it. We'll follow this up closely by RSS feeds for our special coverage sections and every film festival we've written about before really starting to educate the indieWIRE audience what they can do with all this. By that point we'll be up over 600 feeds, and all that is just the tip of the iceberg.

The new tool we're playing around with now is ready to output those RSS feeds as essentially a by-product of the larger task of mapping out the related context of every phrase we've ever bold-tagged in indieWIRE: companies, people, festivals, foundations, films, etc. It's fairly good-sized database of cross-sliced meta-data that will take a while to clean up to perfection (and in the process will power a new generation of search, cross-indexing and personalization for the website as well as dumping RSS files for each of those phrases.) I suspect we'll top 7,000 seperate RSS feeds just on individual topics (and finding ways to cluster them into other topics is when the fun really begins.) It's a sort of indiecyclopedia in its final phase.

indieWIRE has a few different audiences and has always struggled against their different expectations. There are some who wish we'd publish more than 3-5 stories a day. There are others for whom a daily email newsletter is too much. And there are others still who have no lasting interest in independent film beyond the political or social mirror it holds up from time to time. If we can work out this architecture, we might be able to make all three happy.

So while having nearly as many RSS feeds as we have articles in our archives might seem a little odd at the surface, the ways we'll combine those (and the ways that others will plug them into every RSS-enabled-widget imagineable) should make it feel fluid instead of vast. But it means we need something more elegant than a listing of RSS feeds and scattering of orange XML buttons through out the text by the time we're done.

posted to Internet Publishing on March 17, 2004