Via hublog: "NCBI's PubMed is to offer RSS feeds for searches. Only took them 2½ years."
Update: Pubmed RSS is now live. After doing a Pubmed search, click on the drop down menu for "send to" and RSS is now one of the options. The feature allows you to specify a name for the feed and number of items to include, see here for an example of the result. Pubmed is using RSS version 2.0 and dumping the content of the HTML citation display directly into the description tag. For most users this won't matter as the display in most aggregators, like bloglines for example (see the bioinformatics folder), will be the same as the regular Pubmed site. However using RSS 1.0 with available modules would have enabled more metadata to be added to the feeds, see for example the semantically rich feeds produced by Connotea. Which is great if you're a Semantic Web fan, which we all are right ?
Interestingly it looks like RSS export is going to be part of the Eutils web services (see the feed url). Now if RSS 1.0 export was available from all the NCBI databases then we would have instant RDF data.
I'll leave commenting on issues such as the correct identifiers to use in the Pubmed RSS (lsids ?) and whether or not the RSS 2.0 feeds are valid, use best practices (entity encoding the HTML in the description elements) etc. for later as I'm busy with ISMB related activities.
