I’m kind of sick and tired of RSS feeds now. I have used NetNewsWire for quite a long time. I subscribe to a few hundred feeds and I try to get through them every day. This has worked well for a while, but it is starting to have diminishing returns. RSS is now a concept based on a faux imposed sense of linearity and a lack of fluidity between subject. It’s not that the protocol is stupid, it’s that the use of the protocol has not and does not lay claim to the power of such information flowing in. So here are my problems and here are my solutions:
Problems:
- RSS Readers are Feed Based - This seems obvious that this is how they originated, but why is it still stuck this way? Feeds should be the source-pipes for a large pool of content. They shouldn’t be segmented only according to originating point, but should flow into a pool that can be segmented in such a way, but do not have to be.
- RSS depends on the quality of the feed - ArsTechnica is a shitty blog. There, I said it. They assume I want to go to their website. I do not. I don’t have time to. I want to consume their content at my leisure on devices of my choosing. I don’t want one paragraph. I want the content!
- Blogs are a culture of reblogging - The worst concept that exists in the world is retweeting/reblogging/me-tooism. No one adds discourse. They add a frame of sort of, non-committal opinion with rehashed PR in between. Mashable, TechCrunch… all guilty. Cult of personality blogs with little in the way of actual discourse. For every one person talking about something, there are 100 people vomiting up the same shit.
- Most posts aren’t worth reading - The ratio is maybe 100:1 in terms of worthy discourse.
- Feed Readers are dumb - They don’t learn, they don’t take advantage of the power of the computers they run on (whether hosted or desktop). I have a super computer on my desk, and in my fucking pocket. A nearest-neighbor algorithm really doesn’t take much processing power!
- Feed Readers are based on feed, not content - Big mistake. I dont’ care where the content comes from, I just want to feed thee machine. There’s enough content in my feed to make a pretty well formed feed-forward neural net, enough dimensions for a good SOM or k-nearest neighbor algorithm. But no, I’m stuck with synchronic modal content? Why?
Solutions
- An intelligent feed-reader - Treat the content coming in as seeds for a complex system. Complexity gets smarter the more probabalistic the source data is. There is a shit load of source data here to play with, and a good amount of lexical analysis that one can run on it, not to mention using the Internet for added intelligence: use it.
- A feed reader that learns - If I click through to an item, I do indicate affinity for it. If I linger and scroll down an item, likewise. Remember how in Snow Crash, YT’s mom’s programming and working behavior was determined by scrolling? That was 1995 people.
- We have a lot better UI’s than lists of text - Learn some good ways of presenting a lot of information in an easy to consume manner.
- Include a ticker option - We all have big displays now, or a computer to a TV screen, etc. I’d love an RSS reader to include a screen saver for my big-screen and a ticker for my desktop.
- Learn from my extra-RSS reader browsing behavior - within reason.
- Allow easy collection of interesting content - I don’t have time to read everything, but I often find myself in places where I can, ie: on planes, in cars, in lines. Help that behavior.
- Make it a desktop app - I’ve never found a web-based app that performs as good as a desktop one. Sorry, its just reality.
There’s my bitching for the day.
I figure if we have so many seeds into an inherently complex system, some form of emergent intelligence should occur. Why has this not happened yet?
Comments 7
Ethan,
The current alogs/models of clustering/recommendation does not adapt well to the desktop model. Entropy issues involved in both are entirely different kettles of fish from each other, not to mention computationally awful, irrespective of how fast your Mac is at this point in time.
Posted 09 Oct 2008 at 1:22 am ¶I’m not in total disagreement with you, just partial. I too am weary of my RSS feeds, but I still find the value to be high.
” * RSS depends on the quality of the feed - ArsTechnica is a shitty blog. There, I said it. They assume I want to go to their website. I do not. I don’t have time to. I want to consume their content at my leisure on devices of my choosing. I don’t want one paragraph. I want the content!”
Partial feeds don’t bother me and make for easier scanning (personal preference). I have to just your post just on the title so I may be missing some interesting stuff from you. But ultimately, I want to read it in my reader.
” * Blogs are a culture of reblogging” -
One word: unsubscribe. I’ve pared down to GigaOm and Ars (main articles/Apple section). They cover the big important news. The others you mention are all crap.
” * Most posts aren’t worth reading - The ratio is maybe 100:1 in terms of worthy discourse.”
Isn’t that the killer app of RSS readers? Get updates without visiting websites and know what’s being discussed without reading.
” * Feed Readers are dumb -
* Feed Readers are based on feed, not content - ”
Have you checked what the pressflip guys have been doing? It is web-based, but from what I could tell the last time I tried it they’re aiming for a smart, content based news retrieval system. After I check it out again, I’ll report back. (insert winking smiley here)
Posted 09 Oct 2008 at 7:09 am ¶I think you’re problem is in your first paragraph - “a few hundred feeds”! That’s just nuts. Be selective. You don’t NEED to consume that amount of info. I use Google Reader and it’s still working for me really well.
Posted 14 Oct 2008 at 10:26 am ¶I like your two ideas for a more intelligent feed reader (offering similar content links to every post?) and one that learns (put the most-read blogs up top? put the posts most similar to previous clickthroughs at the top of every individual blog rss?) are both very good. There should be a simple, killer app embedded in there somewhere.
Posted 15 Oct 2008 at 5:56 am ¶I use Google Reader and I love it.
Posted 15 Oct 2008 at 3:58 pm ¶the only thing i ended up knowing from my reader is that there’s just “too much” information for one person to learn about. let’s implement that.
Posted 16 Oct 2008 at 1:41 pm ¶More than meets the eye (a reblog).
The discourse is on a need to know basis.
“Phatic Communion” is an obscure phrase first used in the 1920s by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in the book The Meaning of Meaning (1923) to describe unacknowledged communication networks among tribes, the archetypal cliches that are embedded so deeply in the culture that no one even realizes they exist. It can also be described as a form of communication where the verbal content is not intended literally; its true meaning, in fact, is completely different from the content of the message.
Posted 03 Nov 2008 at 7:35 pm ¶Post a Comment