Tag: RSS

The Future of RSS Isn’t Another NetNewsWire:

My hope is that people don’t use this second chance at a decade old technology just to build NetNewsWire with popovers, a Tweetie-like sidebar and Twitter and Facebook sharing. The future of RSS isn’t in the feeds itself. It’s in figuring out how to extract the information out of those feeds and present it in an interesting and non-overwhelming way.

I’m really excited to see Reeder 3 go live tonight in the App Store. Shawn Blanc and Ben Brooks wrote great reviews of it. I just set it up on my iPhone to sync with my Fever install. No more Google Reader. Pretty slick update to an already great app.

“Phone” is to the iPhone as “RSS reader” is to ?

A reader is for engaging with information; it’s a tool for consuming, managing, and using knowledge. In addition to presenting new information to consume, I also want it to pay attention to, infer insights from, and make accessible in an evergreen matter what I’ve already read. For me, this presents the pinnacle of personal information management — an intelligent tool that can reinforce what I already know and help guide me towards what I need to know.

Daniel Bachhuber – “Phone” is to the iPhone as “RSS reader” is to ?.

Status

Just updated my Feedburner settings which were using a long outdated URL ending. If you’re subscribed to the RSS feed it might be worth checking. http://feeds.feedburner.com/andrewspittle or https://andrewspittle.com/feed/ are what will work going forward.

Mother Jones, Egypt, and liveblogging

I just got around to reading the entirety of the Mother Jones updates on what’s happening in Egypt. If you haven’t seen it yet it’s a treasure trove of information, thanks to Daniel for the link.

Partly due to the fact that it’s such a great resource it leaves me wanting for a better way to track updates on it. What Mother Jones, and a lot of news organizations, have done for their live blogs is create a single post that has many revisions and additions. This gets the information out there while also providing a single place to turn to for updates and back story.

This method works but it leaves a bit to be desired. What’s missing is the ability to track updates as separate news items.

Permalink the updates

Mother Jones has hacked around the inability to reference single updates to the post by adding in anchors for each day’s worth of updates. Here’s Monday for example. This works but is far from a true solution. When Mother Jones publishes an update the entire post is sent out via RSS with the most recent update all the way at the bottom.

The format also means that we have no way to link into their coverage. There is an anchor for each day in the text but I want granularity. I should be able to specify a single update they’ve pushed as something worth reading.

The Guardian’s live blog does a bit better of a job at this. Each update is prefaced with an update-level permalink that will take you right there. They even add a nice touch with the pop-up window there that gives you the link pre-selected.

A better live blog

A live blog should be just that, a fully functional blog with multiple posts that each have a permalink. Otherwise it’s just a post that’s added to over and over again.

Were Mother Jones to turn their Egypt coverage into a true live blog they’d hit these 3 improvements:

  1. Entry-level permalinks: Every entry would have a unique permalink that would allow readers to link deeply into the organization’s coverage.
  2. Granularity in updates: By breaking each update into a single entry it would allow each update to be sent out via any number of media. Combine this with the ability to subscribe to new updates in RSS, Jabber, Email, Twitter, etc. and you have a news organization that can push updates to you anywhere.
  3. Attention of users: I can more easily parse out new information in a complex event like Egypt when every update does not also include the full back story. Keep the broader context available for new readers but allow your repeat users the ability to skip over what they have already read.

Ultimately the updates to an event and the back story need to be separated out. You wouldn’t verbatim republish yesterday’s story with one new paragraph in print so I’m not sure why it flies online. Your RSS feed is your distribution channel, the more repeated noise you push through there the more likely I’ll tune it out.

Updates and context are both important but to stay on top of a fast-moving event new information ought to be easily separable while maintaining a broader compendium of everything that makes up the back story of the event.

RSS keeps me alive and kickin’

Dave Winer has been on a serious win streak for the last few days. On the 4th he defined what an open web means to him. If your web has silos then it isn’t really your web is it?

Then he talked about “A tool whose only output is a set of RSS feeds.” Which sounds like a lovely loosely coupled network. That’s a tool I’d want to use and experiment with.

Finally he weaves RSS, iPads, WYSIWYG editors, and a river of news into a tale of why first impressions are sometimes the most honest but are many times blatantly wrong.

It’s all as Seth Godin says,

RSS is quiet and fast and professional and largely hype-free. Perhaps that’s why it’s not the flavor of the day.

Flavor of the day or not it’s how I consume the vast majority of my news and it alone has radically transformed my consumption of information and acquisition of knowledge. So thank you Dave Winer and all the other developers who have contributed to keeping RSS thriving. 🙂