RSS Updates Move Beyond Pings

Pinging allows Web publishers (mostly blogs) to notify content aggregation sites that their own content has changed, prompting them to update their aggregation database.

While pinging is working fine, especially through services such as Ping-o-Matic, the publisher needs to ping quite a large number of sites to notify all of them of his new content.

But according to a recent eWeek article, some of the leading aggreation services are working together to develop the next generation of content updates.

"Some of the leading RSS search and aggregation services have begun banding together to build a next-generation approach for distributing update notifications to the syndicated feeds that are a core part of most Weblogs and a growing number of news and portal sites.

Called FeedMesh, the approach takes the dozens of ping services that exist today a step further by seeking cooperation among aggregators to share updates among themselves."

If FeedMesh gets adopted by most content aggregation services, that will certainly mean good news for content publishers as it will improve their reach and help them spread their content to more sites automatically.

If you'd like to find out more about FeedMesh, there is a Yahoo! Group dedicated to it.