For what it’s worth, I’ve posted a demo showing a couple of feed autodiscovery/autodetection tricks that let you autodiscover feeds in remote pages via a couple of online services: the Google feed api, and YQL (Feed Autodiscovery With YQL).
Try it out: Feed autodiscovery in Javascript (code)
I’ve also added in a routine that uses the Google feed api to look up historical entries on an RSS feed. As soon as Google is alerted to a feed (presumably by anyone or any means), it starts cacheing entries. The historical entries API lets you grab up to 250 of the most recent entries from a feed, irrespective of how many items the feed itself currently contains…
Why it matters: Public Data Principles: RSS Autodiscovery on Government Department Websites?, Autodiscoverable Feeds and UK HEIs (Again…)
PS Just by the by, I added a Scraperwiki view to my UK HEI autodiscovered feeds Scraperwiki. I added a little bit of logic to try to pull out feeds on a thematic basis too…
On the to do list is to create some OPML output views so you can easily subscribe to, or display, batches of the feeds in one go.
I guess I should also add a table to the scraper to start logging the number of feeds that are autodiscoverably out there over time?
OUseful.Info, the blog... 