When you are organizing things you usually have a miscellaneous category for stuff you are not sure where to put. If the miscellaneous category becomes too big then you haven’t really organized things properly.

With Amazon’s product RSS feeds, has RSS broken ‘out of its news-and-weblog-tracking ghetto’ as Loosely Coupled suggest?

RSS is XML and XML allows you to put things in tags that say what they mean – metadata. News has headlines and products have descriptions, so Amazon logically puts the descriptions in the ‘description’ tag.

Here’s the problem? Where does Amazon put the price information. Logically, you would think, in a price tag, since RSS is now extensible. The problem is twofold:

1. people are often nervous about creating their own modules or tags for RSS, there is no simple web forms interface for example that will build one for you (using your email address as a namespace perhaps).

2. aggregators do not read or display all RSS metadata, so putting the price in a price tag might actually make things worse.

With only four things to organize (product name, price, link, product description), Amazon is forced to shoehorn the price of an item into the description tag, the ‘miscellaneous’ bucket.

There are other bits of metadata in the Amazon descriptions, author, publisher etc., and since RSS has taken off because of simplicity, I’m not suggesting that Amazon adopt some hugely complicated committee-driven standard for a book seller module. But price is important, something that really needs to be marked as such to be useful.

RSS is a very good way to syndicate links with clean titles (believe me, this solves a big problem for news aggregation), but until it regularly uses fundamentally important metadata such as prices, then it hasn’t really grown out of the news and weblog ghetto.