Friday, February 03, 2006

Fixing RSS - II

Scott Karp is tackling two different extremes. On one hand there is ignorance about ubiquitous RSS feeds among most of Internet users, and then there is issue of information overflow with too many feeds for some. Fixing one of them may even worsen the other pain.

Dave Winer talks about 'River of News' mode of feed aggregation. Which is a great idea to fix the feed abundance problem, but has its drawbacks. 'River of News' model seems to be too news-centric, which is okay if you are aggregating news and blogs. Syndication is not just about news.What about syndicating a wiki, or a novel, or may be research data or online learning material, which you won't wish to miss in the 'conveyor-belt sushi'. The no-brainer is to separate the two - a river and a pond.

I'm yet to use Dave's aggregator, but the idea is compelling. Google Desktop's web clips come close to the idea - though Dave insists on a web interface, a desktop interface would be nice. But it's what I think it is, I'd still need a pond-type aggregator.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home