When blogs emerged out of the basement to become a cultural force, they brought an accompanying technology along with them. RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, depending on who you ask) held the promise that every citizen could, for free, build their own customized newspaper comprised only of the sources and topics that interested them.
Do you love whippets, the Whitecaps and Whitney Houston? No problem. You can subscribe to newspaper and magazines sites, blogs and search alerts for those topics and never miss a story.
My friends at Common Craft made a video back in 2007 advocating for a customized news future:
RSS was a big deal for a while. Back in 2005, it was a key part of Microsoft’s browser strategy. There were several prominent start-ups who produced RSS readers, only to be eclipsed by Google’s offerings. Lots of technology pundits were convinced that it would usher in a new phase of customized news. Others worried that it would create a million echo chambers, where people would only read news about topics they cared about.
Though it’s an important part of Internet plumbing, RSS never really caught on among Normal Humans.
We prefer to be spoon-fed
I was discussing this today, and more than one person suggested that RSS got broadsided by social sharing. That is, that link and news sharing by peers on Facebook and Twitter replaced RSS. There’s some merit to this theory. My own Google Reader usage has declined a bit thanks to time spent on social media tools.
Another possibility? Site publishers, whether newspaper magnates or niche bloggers, want people to visit their sites. They want more page views to increase their advertising revenue, and ads in RSS never really took off. As such, the very people who should have been RSS’s evangelists felt pretty chilly toward the technology.
Ultimately, though, I think RSS was just too much work. I don’t mean to sound misanthropic, but the average person prefers to be spoon-fed.
The irony is that when I’m giving talks and workshops, people often ask me some variation of “how do I keep up with all these blogs and news sites and keyword searches I’m supposed to be monitoring?” The answer, which is usually followed by a demo of Google Reader, is RSS.
I don’t have much to say about them yet, but I’m interested to see whether algorithmic, curatorial tools like Summify or Percolate will replace news readers for those of us who use them. I’ve got an account on both, but haven’t had time to seriously kick the tires yet. Do you use either tool, or one like it?
At Northern Voice, Rob from Techvibes introduced me to Frank, who (I gather) created ZinePal. Here’s the elevator pitch on ZinePal:
Use zinepal.com to create your own magazines or zines for short. Select content from your favorite blogs, websites or RSS feeds and put it in your zine. zinepal.com creates an online version and a printable PDF. Then you print it and read it in your favorite coffee shop, e-mail it to your friends or just let them subscribe to your online zine feed.
There are bunch of these print-your-blog services out there, but what I liked about ZinePal was the sample Frank handed me. It was a two-page version of the recent posts from Kitsilano.ca (another of the aforementioned Rob’s projects). I snapped a photo:
Kitsilano.ca is a hyper-local blog, covering a particular neighbourhood of Vancouver. It’s easy to imagine that they could produce monthly “best of” editions of their blog using ZinePal, and distribute them to local businesses. They could replace the charming but goofy Coffee News (I recently took a photo of that publication as well). Local businesses could buy a combo advertising package, with their ads appearing both online and in the print edition. Briana from Tenth to Fraser (a blog about New Westminster) should check this out.
I created a quick ZinePal edition of my own site, picking entries that didn’t have embedded video. ZinePal provides a dedicated page for each, uh, zine, or here’s the direct link to the PDF. I didn’t go to the trouble of uploading a custom header or deploying a few other bells and whistles.
In an age of embedded audio, video and other Flash-powered widgets, ZinePal certainly isn’t for every site with an RSS feed. However, I do like the idea of extending a hyper-local blog’s audience into the offline world.
When website managers first discovered RSS, back in 2003 or so, feeds were often published like this:
That’s from the Canucks site. They list these two feeds on their RSS page, with no explanation of what each one contains. Which feed do I want? Is one the subset of another? Does the result of each game qualify as a ‘top story’ or plain old ‘news’?
I was guilty of something similar in 2003, when I still worked for the Man. I don’t think we were very thoughtful about how we split up our news (we had a press release feed and a corporate news feed or some bollocks).
But we’ve had five years to learn, and it’s not brain surgery. Provide one feed with everything in it, and then slice out a few feeds in ways that people might actually want to use them: game highlights, off-ice team news, corporate updates, and so forth.
Over at Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders (who recently sent a schwack of traffic to this old post), I read Wood Tang’s interesting theory on reorganizing your folders in you RSS reader. It makes a lot of sense:
So it dawned on me to group my feeds by the way in which I want to read them, not by topic. If there were some feeds that I didn’t mind missing, and some of which I wanted to read every single word, I should organize them that way, not by their putative subject areas.
He suggests categories like ‘Can’t Miss’, ‘Skip Them’ and so forth. I could combine this with feed filtering from AideRSS and consume more of my feeds more efficiently.
James recently hooked me up with an invitation to FriendFeed. They offer a mega-feed of all your social media activity. It’s kind of a web-wide version of the Facebook news feed. For me, that amounts to these services:
Those are my blog feed, deli.cio.us bookmarks, Digg activity, Flickr photos, Google Reader shared items, Last.fm ‘loved’ songs, Ma.gnolia bookmarks and StumbleUpon activity (they have a bunch of others, like Twitter and LinkedIn, that I don’t regularly use).
Holy crap. Who in their right mind would want to see all of that in one place? It’s my stuff, and I don’t even want to see it.
It’s telling that James sent me an invite for this service. We trade links back and forth quite regularly (James, here’s some live Weakerthans). We used to use Ma.gnolia to do this, but have since recognized that that’s just an extra step. We now rely on good old email.
Theoretically I might want to monitor James’s FriendFeed for stuff that interests me. Except, of course, most of what interests James probably won’t interest me. That’s true for any two people–there’s far more chaff than wheat. We filter the information that we send to each other, thereby imbuing those links with meaning. I don’t want the raw feed.
More Than I Signed Up For
I’ve got a related pet peeve about subscribing to blogs. Without mentioning it, a blogger will add to what was appearing in their RSS feed. They might, for example, add Flickr photos or bookmarks to their previous blog posts-only feed. This bugs me, because I’m no longer getting what I signed up for. I usually contact the blogger and request the pure blog post feed. Hopefully FriendFeed doesn’t exacerbate this problem.
When I think about FriendFeed, there are only two ways I would practically use it:
If FriendFeed or somebody else lays some clever filtering on top of my friend’s mega-feeds. To start with, how about a filter that shows me everything my friends tag as ‘fordarren’, regardless of what service it’s in?
If I wanted to stalk somebody, and collect the digital equivalent of every hair or scrap of skin they left behind.
How would you use FriendFeed? If you want an invite, let me know.
I’m a Canadian Digg user (and in a small minority, as you might expect). I have a fleeting interest in American politics, but I don’t give two depreciated American pennies about a second tier Republican who’s struck the fancy of a few wired libertarians.
Because of Paul’s popularity among Digg users, hilariously mundane Ron Paul stories frequently pollute Digg’s front page. I’ve had enough, so here’s an RSS feed for Digg’s popular stories that filters out all the Ron Paul-related silliness. If I knew how, I’d produce a GreaseMonkey script that did the same thing.
I got a beta invite to AideRSS, but it seems they’ve already launched. In any case, I found some time recently to check it out. First, here’s their pitch:
AideRSS is an intelligent assistant that saves time and keeps you on top of the latest news. We research every story and filter out the noise, allowing you to focus on what matters most.
At first I was skeptical–why do I need somebody else to filter the RSS feeds I’ve already selected and personalized? After playing with it though, I discovered a handy application. In theory, I regularly ‘read’ 170 RSS feeds. In practice, I often skip categories of feeds. AideRSS does a good job of distilling, say, my 25-odd technology feeds and presenting the top ten articles (this FAQ entry describes their approach to ranking).
Plus AideRSS spits out a feed of my top stories. So that’s an RSS feed of my filtered RSS feeds. Nifty.
Two quibbles at the moment: the first is that there’s no means of easily deleting feeds in bulk (or I couldn’t find it). I asked for that feature, because I only want to keep my second-tier (in terms of reading) feeds in their tool. The other thing comes from the Grammar Nazi who lives in my liver–their logo reads as ‘aideRSS’, but they use ‘AideRSS’ everywhere else.
There are lots of websites I visit which are interesting, but for whatever reason don’t merit a blog post. Maybe I’ve just written about something similar, maybe they only rate a 5 on the interestingness scale, maybe I just can’t think of anything clever to say about them.
So, I’ve started a link blog. It lives in that sidebar there, and you can subscribe to the RSS feed for it if you’re so inclined.
