AP Feeds Are Here

So I found the AP RSS feeds yesterday from the RSS Compendium Blog.

Tom at the Media Drop wonders about the direction of news on the web:

New way: News came out on the wire, and various news sites / outlets picked it up. You, the blogger, have a subscription to the feed, and your reader automatically snags any article that has to do with a topic that you cover on your blog. You click on the link through the RSS feed, are directed to the AP.org website, and go from there. Blogger Y links to the AP.org website, therefore removing “News Station X” from the equation, readership declines for “News Station X” (as much as can be argued that bloggers deliver traffic), and advertising rates do not increase over time.

Now perhaps I’m being overly simplistic, but consider mass-trafficked blogs such as an Instapundit or a website like Drudge Report. I’m sure MyWay.com or Yahoo! News is more than happy to take the 1,000,000 visitors that Drudge sent them for the article about the three headed love child of some government official. But that might not be the case forever, if this continues as it seems like it could.

He could be right, but it’s certainly jumping ahead.  The AP currently offers “only” 17 feeds (not much when you think of the number of topics the AP covers), and it’s only in RSS .92.  It’s poorly formatted and it seems like they’re not serving the right header response either (it’s being served as text/plain instead of application/rss+xml or text/xml even).

I’m not so sure any website gets much of a benefit by using the AP feeds from the AP itself instead of using a source like Yahoo, who probably gets the same AP story at just about the same time (and has more categories and is RSS2, although not heavily detailed, there’s still more there); unless they simply don’t want to use Yahoo - but there are alternatives for almost every content topic nowadays.

So it’s a start, but I can’t see how it’ll make an impact until they beef it up some more.

Update: Thanks to rexblog I see the AP is already planning on having tons of feeds based on keywords, and a variety of ways to grab them.  There we go, impact territory.

Posted by David M Singer on Feb 24, 2005 at 02:48 PM

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