DocBug

Fat Pings and Atom Streams

There's interesting work going on between Brad Fitzpatrick at LiveJournal, Bob Wyman of PubSub and other folks at SixApart (who make the MoveableType blogging software) about making continuous streams of blogging content so large aggregators (like PubSub, Technorati or Google) can get continuous updates from large sources of blog posts like LiveJournal, SixApart or Blogger.

See Brad's post on LJ for the inital proposal, these threads on integrating it with the Atom protocol and the Six Apart Update Stream for developments.

Or, if you feel like playing yourself, type this into a command prompt to see a continuous stream of "No one understands me. Should I dye my hair pink or blue?":

telnet updates.sixapart.com 8081
GET /atom-stream.xml HTTP/1.0 <enter>
<enter>

(Extra points for being the first one to plug it into a screensaver :)