Why not use the guid? (was Re: Yahoo! News RSS Feeds Launched)

They have a guid on each item -- why not use it?

http://backend.userland.com/permalinksNewsAggregators

Dave

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Fletcher" <markf@...>
To: <syndication@...>
Cc: <aggregators@...>
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2003 6:41 PM
Subject: Re: [syndication] Yahoo! News RSS Feeds Launched

> Jeremy Zawodny wrote:
>
> >Okay, as noted here:
> >
> >   http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000952.html
> >
> >They're up for real this time.
> >
> >
> >
> It looks like that the <link> for each item in the feed changes every
> time the feed is fetched. It looks like a tracking URL is being used,
> perhaps to correlate a link to a particular RSS fetch. I don't mind the
> tracking aspect, but because the link changes, Bloglines considers each
> item as being updated every time we fetch one of the feeds. We track
> which items each user has read, and when an item is updated, we treat it
> as an unread item. So users end up seeing items they've already read,
> over and over.
>
> Any chance of getting this changed? We could special case the Yahoo
> feeds. Or we could ignore changes to <link> tags in general. Both are
> doable, but suboptimal.
>
> As an aside, to other aggregator writers. Do other aggregators consider
> changes to <links> to indicate that an item has been updated?
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Mark
> --
> Mark Fletcher
> Bloglines
> http://www.bloglines.com
>
>
>
>
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