Blogger, RSS Feeds, and Creative Commons
Blogger's new features and new look is awesome and everyone seems to be loving it. One thing that Blogger is still missing though is a way for users to customize their RSS feeds more. (For those of you who don't know what RSS is check out What is an RSS Feed? and Introduction to RSS). Users of Blogger can currently edit their website template and the HTML code in their posts but they do not have the ability to alter their RSS feed in any way. Blogger probably does this so people cannot mess up their RSS feed and render it useless. A good way for Blogger to allow editing is to allow users to add some extra select tags to their feed to allow some more flexiblity. The RSS tags are really the only thing that need editing.
The reason I thought of this is because I recently licensed my blog under a Creative Commons license to allow people to re-distribute my work, make derivative works from it, and even sell my work as long as they give me credit for it and license their work under the same Creative Commons license. This allows the words I am writting here to be heard legally by means of open-source-like redistribution. Anyways, after licensing my work I found that I could put a few tags into my RSS feed and people would know, if they accessed my blog via the feed, that the work was still licensed under the Creative Commons license. I then realized that there was no way for me to edit the feed without logging into my server and manually editing it. Blogger doesn't currently allow users to edit their feeds in any way
My idea for Blogger is to create a few form fields (HTML input boxes) to allow users to add the correct tags to their document to inform users about the licensing information of their feed. Each post should have its own licensing tag (which will proabably be the same for all posts). An example of the licensing tag is:
The whole blog should also have some other tags in it to denote what rights the reader has. More information about denoting a creative commons license in an RSS 1.0 feed can be found at RDF Site Summary 1.0 Modules: mod_cc.
The reason I thought of this is because I recently licensed my blog under a Creative Commons license to allow people to re-distribute my work, make derivative works from it, and even sell my work as long as they give me credit for it and license their work under the same Creative Commons license. This allows the words I am writting here to be heard legally by means of open-source-like redistribution. Anyways, after licensing my work I found that I could put a few tags into my RSS feed and people would know, if they accessed my blog via the feed, that the work was still licensed under the Creative Commons license. I then realized that there was no way for me to edit the feed without logging into my server and manually editing it. Blogger doesn't currently allow users to edit their feeds in any way
My idea for Blogger is to create a few form fields (HTML input boxes) to allow users to add the correct tags to their document to inform users about the licensing information of their feed. Each post should have its own licensing tag (which will proabably be the same for all posts). An example of the licensing tag is:
<cc:License rdf:about="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">
The whole blog should also have some other tags in it to denote what rights the reader has. More information about denoting a creative commons license in an RSS 1.0 feed can be found at RDF Site Summary 1.0 Modules: mod_cc.
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