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I'm not sure if the application ExpandingBrain is working on -- Focus -- is an outliner, or something that does something else but has an outliner in it. but here's a screenshot. Donovan Watts writes about some tall bikes. I wonder if he's heard of my friend Larry Stone, or my buddies at SCUL. I've been using MonitorThis and Gada.be quite a bit to generate an OPML file of search-driven RSS feeds. It just occurred to me that what I want is a much more generalized version of this: a search engine where I type in a term, and I get an opml file of every result that has an RSS feed (maybe I'd want a delimiter, like the first 100 results with feeds). Paolo: OPML espresso cups, single, double, and triple. Paolo works on the aggregator Blogbridge. Nick Bradbury says that Feeddemon already stores attention data in OPML. I guess that means I've got attention stuff already, since I'm an FD user. I have to admit, I still don't understand what people mean when they talk about attention. I must be getting stupid in my old age RSS "overload" Speaking of things I don't get, I read a lot of stuff about people feeling overwhelmed by their RSS readers. I never understood this. I subscribe to hundreds of feeds, verging on 1,000. And I don't feel overwhelmed. Then I tried some other aggregators, and I got it. Many aggregators treat individual posts in an RSS feed like an email client treats individual email messages. RSS, seen this way, looks and feels like email: you're supposed to read each message, if you don't, you're behind. Worse, they required you to click on each feed and see what was in there. As a subscriber to a gazillion feeds, I'd never do that. I realize I'd been using my aggregator in what Dave calls a "River of News" way -- I just get all my feeds displayed on one huge long page, newest first. It feels like a newspaper -- I don't feel compelled to read every article if I don't want to. I scan and stop if something catches my attention. FeedDemon even calls this feature "Group Newspapers." (FD actually has a second pane that turns it into an email-like interface, but initially, I didn't understand what it was for and I never used it). The advantage of making an RSS reader look and work like an email client is that it's familiar to the user. The downside is that it links it with a medium that many users already feel overwhelmed and oppressed by -- something they have a duty to, that piles up when they leave it for a bit. Yuck! What kind of software would encourage a good feeling, a feeling of play? Zoom down the river in your RSS raft. Yeehaw! |
Last modified: Sunday, November 20, 2005 at 6:58 PM.
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