The problem I’d most like to solve as a technologist and as a blogger is information overload. When I moved beyond mom blogging into tech blogging I discovered an entire new ocean of information. Today I feel like a tow-in surfer at Jaws, Maui’s North shore surfing site famous for its monster waves. Today I decided to learn more about OPML, attention.xml, reading lists, and other mechanisms that might optimize news reading. Today I rode a huge wave of information about huge waves of information.
Technorati towed me in. If you’re interested, I’ll let you follow the links; I’m not repeating them here. One thing that’s alternately frustrating and fruitful in techblog country is how tech blogs link back and forth and across and around and this way and that way. You can’t quite get oriented because you keep seeing the same blogs with different posts about the same topic or the same posts but linked by different bloggers or different posts by different bloggers that contain almost exactly the same information. Then your poor brain, numbed by sound-alike blog posts and public displays of linky-love, needs to distill the important information from that link and article soup. Wouldn’t it be better if some software did it instead? Do you need to read three or five or seven different posts linking to each other and saying very similar things? No, you need some sort of summary that ensures that you see the important stuff at least once and only once.
We’re a long way from something like that but it’s not too much to expect that in 2006 we’ll take a step beyond simplistic aggregators. Bloglines, the news reader I use, shows me every single article from each one of the 100+ feeds I’m subscribed to. I might be better off with a river of news style aggregator that shows me headlines. Then I could pick and choose which articles I’m going to read instead of picking and choosing from the feeds that show up as having new posts. It could even watch me and figure out what I like, then suggest what else I might like, from my subscriptions and from new sources that I might not even know about. [Update 1/17/05: commenter Sara pointed out you can make Bloglines show only headlines or just excerpts of posts, for all subscriptions or on a per-feed basis. There’s no reason a three-panel aggregator couldn’t include a recommendation engine that watches which posts the user reads.]
But that would be just one way of making news reading more efficient and more enjoyable. I’ve been thinking about the many dimensions along which news readers/aggregators/filters can operate. I’d like to construct a chart that plots what’s currently available on that n-space [insert geeky sound effects here]. But I’m tired from hanging ten on that gnarly wave of information about OPML and its sistren*, so I’ll save my geeky chart for a later post.
*like brethren, only girlish, in a good way. Coined by Jeneane Sessum, as far as I know.
6 Comments
I believe you can configure Bloglines to only show you headlines. It’s up under “My feeds –options”
I’ve also discovered the value of folders in Bloglines (which you may already have done), and that if you click on a folder you’ll get only the new articles/summaries/headlines from that folder — but for all the feeds in that folder, allowing a very quick scan.
Note: Not defending Bloglines’ failings here; I started out with it mostly because it was the first web-based aggregator I’d heard of, and now the thought of converting my 100+ feeds overwhelms me with tiredness.
Sara, thanks, you’re right. I’m going to try that and see how I like it. So far seems better.
I think Bloglines does what it does pretty well. I couldn’t have started reading 100+ feeds without it.
I love the “river of news” option, it used to be the default of Newsgator, now it must be selected. I far prefer Newsgator to Bloglines, btw, and have set up a demo account that anyone can use to look around a Newsgator account seeded with lots of different types of feeds (blogs, news, search, multimedia). http://newsgator.com username: marshalldemo pw: welcome
Great, Marshall. I’m going to try your demo Newsgator account tomorrow. I looked at Newsgator once but wasn’t so interested then in news readers as I am now. That’s when I subscribed to about 20 feeds.
Hi, Anne! My name is Lisa and I’ll be your jet-ski operator today. I run a blog about OPML with an eye towards turbocharging and automating RSS — both publishing and subscribing. Enjoy!.
I tried Bloglines, but the email paradigm — folders you have to click on — doesn’t scale when you have 600 feeds. I’m not going to read each item, I need something I can scan quickly, like a newspaper where I can scan the page and pick out what I want. I use FeedDemon in a river-of-news configuration.
Hi, Lisa. I just subscribed to your OPML blog last night! I’m intrigued by OPML but I think I will need to start using it before I fully get the possibilities.