Tuesday, January 10, 2006

RSS 2.0 Feeds for Airlines from Orbitz

While I may be a tad more enthusiastic about the future prospects for RSS aggregators than my pal Jason, I recognize that merely having a collection of raw RSS feeds is far from the most efficient way to glean information.

RSS needs to be integrated with search for it to shift from convenient to indispensable. Currently you can use Yahoo or MSN to create custom RSS feeds based on search terms, but the reverse is more powerful -- being able to search all of your RSS feeds for text.

For example. Orbitz is touting its new RSS feeds enabling customers to track deals on air fares and car rentals, which includes individual feeds for flights out of 30 cities. That's a good start, but I'd really like to be able to search for deals only from Portland to SF or Oakland.

Setting up search within individual or all feeds would cut my daily news crawl by more than half. Rather than searching for every news site to find out the latest on the Alito hearings, for example, I could just search my preferred websites to get their take.

This will happen very soon, and I'm betting Microsoft will have the slickest implementation by year's end. RSS readers are still toddlers, so just wait and see what happens when they hit puberty!

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 06:10 PM
Permanent Link: RSS 2.0 Feeds for Airlines from Orbitz | Comments (0)

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