I’ve recently become fascinated with the idea of using RSS to maintain a list of items rather than a feed of news or a log. If used in that way, Mozilla Firefox‘s live bookmarks feature, all of a sudden, has a practical use. My website evolved from one links page, that has now become my ilias.ca main page. I originally created a links page to help users in two ways:
– users wouldn’t have to go through the hassle of maintaining a list of help sites for Mozilla or Netscape.
– users wouldn’t have to clog up their bookmarks with help sites. They could bookmark one site, and use that as a gateway.
It seems to me ‘maintaining a set of bookmarks for others’ is what Live Bookmarks is all about. You set up a Live Bookmark to ‘ilias.ca help sites’, and now all the sites appear in that Live Bookmark. Whenever I update a link, add a link, or remove a link, that change is reflected in your Live Bookmark.
And so, I’ve created an RSS formatted file for that purpose. Mozilla Firefox users will see the 
, when visiting the ilias.ca main page, and can click on it to create the Live Bookmark.
I was thinking about the concept a little more and realized that if you store bookmarks in an RSS formatted file, you can use them on a customizable web portal, like Google’s Personalized Home. Supposedly, Internet Explorer 7 is supposed to have much greater RSS support. Maybe it would be possible to actually make Firefox and Internet Explorer use the same bookmarks RSS file. Oh the possibilities…
Humm it sounds very interesting. Another usefull way to use RSS is for sharing personal bookmars between different computer (home, work, laptop etc). I mean that we can create a RSS bookmark file on a server an this will be available from every computer without the need to use the extension Bookmark Syncronizer.
We need a way to manage the remote rss file and this could be a FF extension that make a connection with a server side REST application.