First of all, feeds are fantastic. Dear reader: if you don’t understand or use RSS or feedreaders yet, do not go past go, take a few minutes out of your day to learn what RSS is (one good explanation with a great diagram). There’s many other good tutorials out there, as with all things, just ask your google.
In an enlightened world, Everyone should be out there bathing in that glorious, luminous river of news. But the trouble is many feeds/sites are rather more like the FireHoseOfNews than a gentle softly flowing brook.
This is because rss reading as it is, is traditionally at odds with the web publishing model of most sites/blogs. The golden rule for building traffic is more post per day drive traffic. On traditional feed readers though, this is a good way to see you get unsubscribed.
Google reader has one strategy for this the “autosort” that automatically floats less frequent posters to the top. These days google reader seems to have taken over from bloglines as the class leader du-jour for feedreading.
Also to watch are apps like pipes and blastfeed or for that matter jaiku or tumblr that let ‘you’ mashup/combine or filter on raw feeds themselves.
What I’m still waiting for is the killer Enterprise 2.0 feedreader. One that combines socialbook marking with a killer aggregator. Imagine what you can do with an entire community of interest on a common reading platform. This opens up a number of opportunities for harvesting collective intelligence. Implicit collaborative filtering, or just simple zeitgeist tracking. As of wednesday at 11am what is the tags or pages of interest are most being viewed by the enterprise, the group or your team?
for the record here is my blog feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/thomaspurves.
What does your perfect feed reader look like?
Interesting questions. My idea feed reader would take the Google Reader approach further by providing context. Similar to techmeme, I would like my reader to sort my daily feed results into meme’s that I could choose to read or not. Key is that these would be my meme’s. This would eliminate the need to read duplicative posts, and highlight posts such as this one, that are unique.
Today I do this by minimising the number of feeds I follow, and mentally associating the post quality with the poster name. Then I have to go through and aliminate 20% of my feeds monthly to make up for the 20% increase from those I added. The meme thing could help me with that, and even automate the process, by proposing which ones I eliminate, and suggest new ones to add.
Interesting questions. My idea feed reader would take the Google Reader approach further by providing context. Similar to techmeme, I would like my reader to sort my daily feed results into meme’s that I could choose to read or not. Key is that these would be my meme’s. This would eliminate the need to read duplicative posts, and highlight posts such as this one, that are unique.
Today I do this by minimising the number of feeds I follow, and mentally associating the post quality with the poster name. Then I have to go through and aliminate 20% of my feeds monthly to make up for the 20% increase from those I added. The meme thing could help me with that, and even automate the process, by proposing which ones I eliminate, and suggest new ones to add.
My perfect feed reader also includes the ability to turn a subfolder of my feeds into my blogroll for inclusion in my blog sidebar, so that my blogroll always contains exactly what I’m reading. Bloglines lets me do that (in fact, I use three different subfolders for three different blogs’ blogrolls), but Google Reader doesn’t.
My perfect feed reader also includes the ability to turn a subfolder of my feeds into my blogroll for inclusion in my blog sidebar, so that my blogroll always contains exactly what I’m reading. Bloglines lets me do that (in fact, I use three different subfolders for three different blogs’ blogrolls), but Google Reader doesn’t.
Hello Thomas, interesting post. Thanks for mentioning Blastfeed. What you suggest in your last paragraph is somewhat in line with what we aim to build. Indeed Blastfeed brings some services that we would like to include in something broader. For instance we have built a web site that monitors hundreds of feeds and looks for any mention of French presidential candidates, sort items through and counts (it’s in French). All is automatic.
Based on that work we want to come up with a better way to manage and read RSS for a community of interest. Aggregation, filtering, sharing, commenting, similar posts, manipulating blogrolls, etc. All this to unleash collective intelligence. I’ll keep you posted.
Patrick.
Ooups, looks like I put a relative URL for the French presidential elections web site. It should be web site.
Ooups, looks like I put a relative URL for the French presidential elections web site. It should be web site.
Hello Thomas, interesting post. Thanks for mentioning Blastfeed. What you suggest in your last paragraph is somewhat in line with what we aim to build. Indeed Blastfeed brings some services that we would like to include in something broader. For instance we have built a web site that monitors hundreds of feeds and looks for any mention of French presidential candidates, sort items through and counts (it's in French). All is automatic.
Based on that work we want to come up with a better way to manage and read RSS for a community of interest. Aggregation, filtering, sharing, commenting, similar posts, manipulating blogrolls, etc. All this to unleash collective intelligence. I'll keep you posted.
Patrick.
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