When the world's dominant software company runs into a problem with the webfeeds for its developer network, lots of hackers go apeshit and start cooking up solutions. Sam Ruby reports on FeedMesh, a grassroots effort that broke out at Foo Camp to start building a P2P webfeed content distribtion network. Not a bad kernel of folks/organizations to start out with: blo.gs, Feedster, Yahoo!, and Bloglines.
The group has decided to initially focus on update notification distribution. There's actually enough working knowledge out there to just go for it, and try to knock out the content distribution problem too, in my humble opnion.
I wonder what would happen if a couple of big publishers added a few nodes to Coral and started issuing redirects for those feeds into that cdn? Presuming aggregators actually correctly honored HTTP redirects, publishers could selectively join as needed, aggregators wouldn't have to change much, and everybody would win.
Sounds too good to be true.
Update: The commentary on Scoble's posts is a quite entertaining microcosm of many technical discussions. Everything from, "of course it's broken", to "it was stupid server implementation", to "aggregators are implemented wrong", to "no it's not broken", to "we saw and solved all those problems in the 90's", to "let economic forces take care of the problem". And that doesn't even include all of the other weblog commenatary out there that's hard to round up in one place.
New Media Hack is of the opinion that they're all right and all wrong. Except maybe those who start off with, "the solution is simple". It always is if you only consider your perspective.