I’ve been keeping my eye on FeedBurner since it came out, but I never really had a use for it. When they announced a partnership with Flickr I was pretty impressed, and yesterday I finally got around to actually taking a look into splicing the atom feed for this blog together with my flickr photos (there really aren’t many, don’t get excited) to produce an RSS feed. It was very interesting.

As soon as I’d done that, I instantly wanted to splice my blog feed, my del.icio.us bookmarks feed and the BBC “On This Day” feed together. But you can’t. I admit I was pretty disappointed, I’d got pretty excited about the possibilities – instant stitching and republishing of any N feeds would be amazing!

Exactly why you can’t do it is explained on the FeedBurner weblog today:

you should be able to splice your blog feed and moblog feed together, but you probably shouldn’t splice major media company’s news feed into your blog feed and then pump ads into the feeds. That would be what we call “problematic.”

Aha, yes now. That would be a good reason. I hope they work out how they can do this, because whilst I could write an app to take an arbitrary feeds and republish them as one, I really don’t want to have to. I want some magic on the web to do it for me. Surely that’s the point of all this decentralised stuff, isn’t it?