A few quick comments:
createtime ... seems to be in UTC or perlmonks server time
It is UTC (GMT).
anything... which is a reply to something else is a "note".
Except for 'categorized answer', which is used for... categorized answers :-)
If you are looking at processing the Newest Nodes, you may want
to take a look at the PerlMonks::NewestNodes
module, which does threading and all the necessary querying
and jumping and hooping. Feel free to use it or portions of it
(and give me feedback!)
or just to give you a better idea of the types of things that
the different XML tickers return.
--ZZamboni
