RSS feeds behavior analysis, structure and vocabulary
Résumé
Web syndication technologies such as RSS or Atom are present everywhere on the Web for supporting a timely delivery of frequently updated Web content. Almost every personals weblogs, news portals, or discussion forums employ nowadays RSS/Atom feeds for enhancing the traditional pull-oriented searching and browsing of web pages with the push-oriented protocols of web content. Social media applications such as Twitter or Facebook also propose RSS for notifying users about the newly available items of their preferred friends (or followees). Unfortunately, previous works on RSS/Atom statistical characteristics do not provide a precise and updated characterization of feeds' behavior and content, characterization that can be used to successfully benchmark the effectiveness and efficiency of various web syndication processing/analysis techniques. In this paper, we present a thorough analysis of three complementary features of real-scale RSS/Atom feeds, namely, publication activity, items characteristics, as well as, their textual vocabulary that we believe are crucial for emerging Web 2.0 applications.