Newsgroups & RSS --> why not?

Chris Sells made an excellent point last week when he said he doesn't read anything that doesn't have an RSS feed. You know, I was thinking just last night that I don't get around to reading the microsoft.* newsgroups as much as I want to recently. I like looking through all the posts in a few selected newsgroups there and seeing the questions people ask and responses. I began to wonder to myself why aren't there or hasn't anyone seen any work done on making RSS feeds available of non-binary data in newsgroups. I did a quick search on Google just to confirm that indeed there wasn't any significant or any work done on this, and my speculation was correct. The only thing that came up was this news reader that was able to read newsgroups and RSS feeds. So, I began on thinking, wouldn't it be cool to be able to get an RSS feed going of say all the microsoft.* newsgroups? Or rather an RSS per newsgroup? I think that that'd be pretty nifty. I think in my spare time (if there is any) I may end up writing a RSS 2.0 Module and implementing it in RSS.NET for the newsgroup RSS feeds.

UPDATE #1: Since I posted this about 15 or so minutes ago, I started to look if there were any Web Services that would allow me to at least grab the articles off newsgroups. I came across this one that is supposedly specific to the Microsoft Newsgroups, but then again, the link is hopelessly dead. As I think about this even more, I think the best way for this would be to provide an XML Web Service for reading (at the minimum) newsgroups posts, and then “translating” or “bridging” those posts to a nice RSS 2.0 feed with a specific nntp RSS Module. I think that I will begin by writing a spec for this module...

UPDATE #2: Ok, looks like my search tonite has yielded nothing but dead links. I found a Newsgroup XML Web Service written by the always amazing Casey Chesnut... But his site is down. ARGH!!!! Hopefully this XML Web Service is what I'm looking for.