RSS and the Travelling Salesman Problem

One of the best parts of MindCamp was the "Lightning Talks", an open-session where anyone can request five minutes to talk about anything they want to talk about. Something that I came up with from last year's camp, and has still been bothering me six month later was that RSS has two inherent problems.

The problem is that since RSS is a user-subscribe system, it leads to an increasingly narrow view, not to mention that there ends up being a lot of redundancy. The narrow-view can't really be helped (or maybe it can; Dave Winer suggested that a system he has in steath mode might be the ticket), but I think the redundancy can.

Think about it ... anyone that uses RSS heavily runs into theproblem of having fifteen different sets of opinions on the same topic. That's wonderful, but did you ever stop to think about what the catalyst was for the coversation? Who was the root source? Not all blogs or news services properly source their stories, but a lot of them do. There's really no reason why you can't track a story back through the links and find out who the originator of meme was, and then present the conversation in a more hierarchical view (perhaps by date). As a journalist, correctly citing my sources is of utmost importance, but even for a lay-person, knowing where it all started could be useful.

Well, apparently there is a reason, and it's called "The Travelling Salesman" (TSP) problem. I wasn't that aware of the problem since I'm not a programmer, but I remember coming across something similar in a math class that had a section on combinatorics. Now that I've read up on TSP, I'm not convinced that my theory is anywhere near as hard. Since every feed should be dated, and should contain a reference link, the work is largely already done, it's just a matter of tracing links back until you can't trace them back, then pick the one that goes furthest back.

After the lightning talks, a person whose name escapes me at the moment, told me that he thinks I have a great idea, and not to be discouraged. A lot of great ideas sit around a while before they can be implemented, and not to worry that it'll never happen. Seems like a good enough reason to start ringing bells and try to get some movement on it.

Speaking of Dave, turns out that he's a West Wing fan. I have to agree, the past few weeks have been great, probably because they now don't have to worry about continuity and can simply give the fans what they want. I'm disappointed that the show is over in two weeks, but at the same time, it'll be interesting to see if ABC's Commander in Chief will step up to fill my political jones.

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