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Is the world ready for time-warped RSS feeds?

As feed and subscription technology ages ever so slightly, I thought there might be a need for the ability to read RSS feeds only from a certain window of time. Plus I had just finished the book “The Time Traveler’s Wife” which seems like chick lit until you realize it’s practically science fiction, or speculative fiction, an amazing love story entwined in the leap of faith the reader takes, accepting that the husband can time travel. That powerful book left me wondering about the passage of time and how to immerse yourself in another time.

So, about two years ago I wrote up the idea, and what-do-you-know, Bloglines has added a longer time span to their return content feature, allowing you to read from feeds from 2001. When you’re logged in and on the Feeds tab, click the Search tab in the right-hand pane and then click More to get the advanced search.

One usability note in case anyone at Bloglines reads this: it might make sense to have the second set of date selectors automatically be set to December 31, 2001. 

This post outlines some use cases for this RSS search specialty.

Overall description of retro feeds, or time-warped feed reading

The general concept is a mash-up of archive.org and an RSS aggregator like Bloglines. One approach would be to design and create a plug-in that would work with many of the popular RSS aggregators, or, another approach is to write a web form where users just enter the feed URL and the date window.

Use cases for retro feeds

Many thanks to Charlie Wood at Moonwatcher for his use cases so I could expand on those excellent RSS use cases for time-warped RSS use cases.

• Journalists who want to dig deep into a story from the past, such as the Enron accounting scandal, can immerse themselves in an RSS news story feed that is from early 2002. Put this string into the Search for Posts box in Bloglines: enron scandal betweendate:20020101,20031231.
• Researchers or reviewers of technology who want to follow all blog posts from LinuxWorld October 26 - 28, 2004.
• Time warped RSS feeds on campaign finance reform in 2004 could show the influence of a topic for beginning an upswing or starting a downfall.
• You want to see non-standard media outlets covering the surgence of RIAA lawsuit letters going out before 2005, so you also click the Exclude news radio button and make the date range pre-2005.
• A public relations person wants to discover when blogs first started talking about a problem with their product, such as the initial scratchability discovery of the screen for the iPod Nano.

Please, let me know your feedback on these use cases. Are there other uses for retro feeds that I haven’t covered? Have you ever needed to limit your blog searching with date boundaries?