Most of the RSS feeds that are around are basically feeds from a single source, and few take advantage of metadata within them. However a few more interesting tweaks are happening. One is on-the-fly RSS generated from a search term.
Wired now allows this and Moreover has been allowing customers to create on-the-fly RSS feeds based on parametric searches over metadata contained in its database for some time. The interesting thing is that a feed based upon a query over metadata, further creates metadata that can enrich the original source. This ’round tripping’ of XML metadata potentially allows for enriching information as it flows around the web – this round tripping can be an infinite virtuous circle.
As a simple example: Suppose an RSS feed contains the full content of articles and an on-the-fly RSS feed can be created by searching this full content. If you create an RSS feed of articles mentioning the term ‘80211.b’, then all articles returned can have a topic tag attached that labels them as being about ‘wireless’, based upon a thesaurus lookup. Tagging the articles with this metadata as a topic is enriching the original source with further metadata.