Dave is running a survey : "We're thinking of doing a new version of Weblogs.Com for RSS feeds. News sources would ping the centralized server when they've updated. The server verifies the change by reading the source, and then adds it to a public list of changed sources, in XML of course. Now the question. If we created such a service, would you use it?"

Dave,

Why not just add an optional parameter to the ping method that describes the category of info. If the parameter isn't passed, "Weblog" is assumed. Other possible values could include "RSS", hmm... "WDSL".

I wouldn't include "OPML" in that list because OPML could be a Weblog. Even RSS could be a weblog, but I would suggest "RSS" means a non-weblog RSS feed, a news source like C|Net, etc. Maybe "News" is better than "RSS" then. The actual content-type of the information should be up to the user-agent to worry about.

BTW, it's a shame your Survey items aren't discussion group messages that can be replied to as top level messages.