Why is it, that the BBC provides RSS feeds for virtually all of it’s news content except when it comes to travel alerts for Lond Underground? What exactly do they think we use RSS for, and why do they think an email service you have to register for is superior to RSS for distributing news? There is “the information(BBC Public Transport travel alerts)”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/travel/public_transport/tube_feature.shtml in all it’s glory, and not a subscribe link in sight.
I think it’s time to see if “Backstage(BBC’s Backstage project)”:http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/ can help out…
magpiebrain 
5 Responses to “Joined-up thinking”
And BBC aren’t alone in that…
TFL (Transport for London: http://www.tfl.gov.uk) do similar. They offer RSS feeds for press releases and articles printed in The Metro. But nothing on travel updates.
Odd.
The data is actually the same – either the BBC provide it for TFL, or the TFL data is given to the BBC.
From what I can tell, the information is syndicated in a format called “TPEG”:http://www.tpeg.org/what_is_tpeg.htm – Backstage actually “expose this feed(BBC Backstage Trave Feeds)”:http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/data/TravelFeeds?v=138u, and I believe there are some prototype projects looking to transform it into something useful.
It sounds like a TPEG to RSS convertor is just what the doctor ordered – and as TPEG is simply XML, perhaps a bit of nifty XSLT would do the job?
They certainly appear to have an XML feed:
http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/data/TravelFeeds?v=138u
http://www.bbc.co.uk/travelnews/xml/tpegml_en/pti.xml
Which isn’t even valid XML according to firefox (it looks like it is though – IE can handle it). If I can get it to parse creating an RSS feed shouldn’t be hard. I’d need to apply some kind of selector to get out only the london underground info (and filter out old news).
Just found you post whilst looking for other TPEG feeds, thought I would let you know that I have managed to parse the TPEG feeds and display them on Virtual Earth
http://www.aylesburyvale.net/traffic