Consider two metaphors:
- The church door metaphor: someone has something to say, so they post a document on the church door. Word spreads about the document and people come to the church door to read it.
- The pamphlet metaphor: someone has something to say, so they stand in the street and pass out (an infinite supply of) pamphlets.
The first is Web 1.0 content, which uses URLs to point to content. In fact in many cases, the URL means the content and people pass around the URL. The second is RSS (and other feeds) where it is the content which is passed around. Clearly, the URL is in trouble. It is going to change from a nearly unique reference to content to a many to one reference to content. Search engines want to deliver pages (URL) with the most appropriate content, but what the user wants is simply the most appropriate content. This is where permalinks become so important. In RSS 2.0, permalink is defined as an optional (default true) attribute on the guid element (which is also optional).
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