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Human Beings: Built To Scan Why do River of News style RSS readers work so well? Because they present a huge amount of information that is easily scannable just by scrolling up and down. Human beings are extroardinarily good at scanning: you might say that we are, in fact, designed to scan by millenia of avoiding being eaten by things with sharp teeth. RSS readers that use an email paradigm frustrate our ability to use our uncanny scanning ability. When we pick up the New York Times, we don't feel obligated to read every article. RSS readers that use an email paradigm -- plunking individual feeds into folders, reporting a mounting number of "unread items" gives us a subtle message that we're under an obligation -- however small -- to read every item in every feed we subscribe to. Piffle! Blogs -- writing an item, and the attention and time needed to read an item -- are free-will offerings. No strings attached! John Tropea reports an email from Chris Saad that touches on this: “RSS news reading has, to date, revolved around the metaphor of email. Opening Feeds like mail folders, item lists, marking items as read and flagging items have been, and will continue to be, necessary and important mechanisms for power users who want to ‘consume’ large amounts of information. myBroadSheet is a different solution for a different type of person. It can broadly be described as an RSS news reader for the mainstream. A mainstream who don’t necessarily want to consume news, but rather experience it in a news reading metaphor they're used to." Phil Jones: "Publicly hosted OPML hierarchies are going to roll right over DMOZ this year, by which I mean they'll exceed DMOZ in popularity." I was, briefly, a DMOZ editor, where I tried to add listings for restaurants in the town I lived in. It was so incredibly painful that I quit after only a few days. The directory wouldn't accept anything less than full descriptions, including phone numbers and URLs, for many businesses that didn't have URLs. So I was immediately in the position of feeding the directory bad data, like thisisnotarealwebsite.com. Decentralization of these directories has another advantage: people are more likely to contribute and care for something they feel a real sense of ownership for. Putting stuff into somebody else's directory feels a lot like whitewashing the fence. David Berlind: "According Dave Winer, wikis could use a bit of OPML (Outline Processing Markup Language). Now that I've had my hand at running a public facing wiki for three months (see the Web site for Mashup Camp) to which many other people have contributed, I'm in agreement with Dave that integrating OPML with wikis makes sense." OPML2Wiki. Wow, that was fast! FeedPile lets you load in an OPML file and get out a dynamic web page showing the latest items in the RSS feeds listed in the OPML file. I suspect pretty soon we're going to have a service that does one thing and one thing only: you load in an OPML file and it creates an insta-directory for you, a mini-DMOZ. Question: how will it handle multiple authors and casual contributors, who just want to tweak one little thing in the resulting directory? It'll be interesting to see how it's done. |
Last modified: Friday, October 31, 2008 at 9:25 PM.
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