RSS Feeds: human or inhuman?
Working on a presentation for a conference where I’m going to talk about RSS and am wondering - what are the coolest examples of nonhuman generation of RSS feeds? I know that technically every search feed, stock report feeds and things like that are generated without the immediate involvement of humans. But some time ago Lisa Williams told me about a buoy at sea that publishes a feed of hourly updates to all kinds of weather conditions. That’s from the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System (GoMOOS). She told me she would like to be able to subscribe to a feed that would tell her when her home’s heating oil was running low.
There’s got to be more examples out there - anyone care to point to ones you know of? I know there are systems to track package delivery (like FedEx). There have to be some RFID systems that utilize RSS. I know there are quite a number of innovative examples of RSS feeds generated in libraries. Limited traffic reports for particular cities from Yahoo and Traffic.com. Incidentlog.com is a cool use of police reports, mashing up feeds and Google Maps.
Really far out examples of RSS feeds being generated for a useful purpose without substantial human input is what I’m looking for. I really believe there will be a lot of this in the future, but the sooner we can find examples the sooner we can prepare ourselves and others for the idea. Please do post examples in comments if you can think of or find any that I haven’t.
To be honest I’d be curious to see peoples’ favorite applications of RSS in any context. Anything already listed by Tim Yang or Basement.org excluded.
