As I’ve missed much of the debate over site syndication (RSS), I just wanted to put this brief question out there: will RSS ever take into account that Internet content may change over time, and thus it’s helpful to indicate the recent change, and reason, explicitly in the RSS summary?

Subscribers to this site’s RSS feed will notice there were a few updates in the last week to the piece cryptically titled Fixing a Blog in Time. I ended up fixing it alright– I had to add that I mischaracterized Bob’s comments (incidentally, the title had referred to two meanings of the word fix: to rig, by backdating a blog post; and also, to establish, which I had to do to find out when the real time of the blog post was). I also just updated it now to make a simple correction in syntax (the story had covered 16 days, not 15). The former type of error certainly needed to get out to all my readers. The latter, perhaps not. It does not appear that RSS supports a ChangeLevel.

Such a setting is needed in any environment where documents are expected to be updated after initial publication. Furthermore, any publication worth its salt should seek software which can help track the number of mistakes, errors, mischaracterizations, and ensuing corrections that it publishes. (It brings to mind a quote from the Texas basketball coach Abe Lemons: “Just once I’d like to see the win-loss records of doctors right out front where people could see them– won ten, lost three, tied two.”) Or these may be just updates based on new information.

And while we’re at it, I wish that RSS had defined some sort universal types, as I have with Story Types, for content.