Dave Winer is thinking out loud about developing a tool to harmonize subscriptions. Sounds awesome. While you’re developing a protocol to do this, why not include the actual RSS feeds in the equation? There currently is no way (short of password protection) for a feed publisher to know how many unique subscribers it has to a feed. So why not ping the publisher at the same time you ping the feed harmonizer?
I’ve experimented with a few HTTP hacks to do this, one of which works reasonably well with NewsGator and FeedDemon, but not other aggregators. It would be nice to see a standard method that involves the aggregator directly in the subscription process.