A couple of weeks ago, I made a straw-man proposal for a new Web feed autodiscovery mechanism. I got some encouragement and some pushback (usual for this sort of thing). One of the issues raised was regarding internationalisation – a few people said that I should support multiple languages in the format, rather than relying on HTTP content negotiation. I felt my approach was adequate, given the specifics of the use case. However, it bugged me: I didn’t have data to back me up – AFAICT there’s no significant information about how feeds are used on the Web today. I realised that this didn’t have to be. Two things helped: a friend at Common Crawl, who assured me that they do indeed crawl feeds, and AI. I don’t have nearly enough time to learn the ins and outs of CC dumps, map/reduce, and the assorted data science bits, but I can babysit a couple of agents1 through it while I do other things. So I did. You can peruse the full (inaugural?) survey report. Below are the major takeaways from…
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