I was looking forward to subscribing to the Authors@Google videos which are hosted on YouTube. Sadly I cannot find an RSS or Atom feed on the YouTube channel page. This seems to be a trend at YouTube; a lack of feeds and when they are available they are hidden away.
Does anyone know where the RSS feed is?
Twingly Screensaver is an interesting visualisation of blogosphere activity. It renders a turning globe with blog activity spiking out from different parts of the world. It reminds me a bit of Mapped Up.
Traditional feed aggregators are still a lot more powerful for churning through news than this. But this kind of visualisation could be useful as an adjunct for trend watching. They should really allow you to keyword filter Twingly Screensaver.
(It requires Windows and OpenGL but works OK in Parallels.)
Watchlists are an important part of the future of RSS feeds. Unfortunately the Technorati implementation is quite poor though in fairness so are all the other watchlist systems I have used.
An example will illustrate this best. For ego and practical use I have a Technorati watchlist with the following query; “Paul Watson” -pirate -captain -whale
Looks odd but there is a good reason for it. My name is quite common and in particular there is an infamous Paul Watson who receives many blog and news entries per day. Without the -pirate -captain and -whale I’d get a lot of irrelevant results.
Recently though Japanese and French bloggers have started blogging about Captain Paul Watson and my watchlist is once again becoming useless.
Technorati either needs to let me specify “English only sources” or translate my query as best it can (unlikely). They already have the former functionality with their main search engine but I haven’t seen the option for watchlists.
There are other problems with Technorati watchlists. One clever blog spams by subtley updating it’s feeds so fooling Technorati into marking the RSS item as new or updated when to my eyes there is nothing new about it. It is very annoying and I eventually unsubscribed from that watchlist. You also cannot edit a watchlist once you have created it. You have to recreate it with your query change, unsubscribe from the old one and subscribe to the new one. There is no blacklist system to block out sources you are not interested in. Nor is there a whitelist system which would be useful too. Duplicates are a problem too. Please, anyone working with RSS needs to implement deduping, it is a basic and fundamental requirement in my opinion. Clustering would be useful too, such as TechMeme does.
Programmers out there will tell me I can do all of this by refiltering my watchlist output using some other system or a bit of unix piping or Yahoo! Pipes etc. etc. No thanks. Watchlists need to be fast and easy, they need to be flexible and usable.
So, I’d really love Technorati to get going on improving its watchlist system (maybe spare a developer from the WTF team? I don’t use WTF.)
I just spotted Kottke Komments and had a further little idea; Create a site that allows anyone to punch in a feed URL and start commenting on the items. So Kottke Komments but any feed URL.
Some problems would be multiple feed URLs for one conceptual feed (e.g. an Atom and an RSS 2.0 feed URL), objections by the author of the feed (would that be an issue?), good old spamming (though I guess spammers wouldn’t get the page-link authority score as it isn’t on the original site) and just general abuse (Kottke doesn’t want comments on his site, maybe he doesn’t want comments on any of his posts?)
I’ll see if I can whip up a prototype and launch it this week. Anyone want to help?
If you are in or around Phoenix, Arizona tomorrow (the 17th) then I’d be in your debt if you attended a Microsoft and NewsGator event and reported back.
Getting back to a couple thousand unread RSS items after a months holiday is not pleasant. Software is rarely designed to cope with absence.
It also highlighted something to me. Feeds which are lists of new things (e.g. MoMB, eHub etc.) are largely worthless when you are also subscribed to leading feeds in your area of interest (e.g. Read/Write, TechCrunch etc.) Anything interesting in MoMB or eHub will also be picked up by the TechCrunch lads. They will also filter out the uninteresting items that are automatically included in other lists.
The bottom line is that interesting things will come to your attention without you needing to be subscribed to “up to the second” list feeds.
Mark Woodman has a useful piece on using Google Reader to make a reading list in place of services like del.icio.us or Blinklist:
Sometimes as a blogger you don’t want to create a new entry just to report an interesting article you found. A much nicer solution is to provide a Reading List of sorts, similar to the point of a blogroll, but at an item level. The ideal Reading List would directly include the content to be read, rather than just a link to it, and be published in Atom or RSS for the convenience of your audience.
In this article I’ll show you how to use Google Reader and FeedBurner to manage a reading list for your audience.
There are two critical problems in this approach though; one, you can’t add your own notes, something I do in my del.icio.us list all the time. Two, you can’t share items that are not from feeds. If a friend emails you a website rather than putting it in their feed you can’t get it into Google Reader and so can’t have it in your reading list.
Until Google Reader allows “manually adding items” and allows for notes or a description to be attached to an item it isn’t a usable trick. A shame really.
Sometimes you wonder if reviewers are simply meeting word counts when they make statements like this:
For example, a search for feeds related to ecology retrieved only 41 items–quadruple what Google Reader found, but Bloglines turned up 383 and Newsgator Online dug up 68
The use of “only” tells me that 41 is bad while 383 is good. What about quality though? Did the reviewer spend a few minutes going through Bloglines’ 383 results? Rojo’s 41 might be 41 brilliant sources while Bloglines’ 383 sources might have just 3 quality sources.
I am complaining because this isn’t some part-time reviewer but a paid reviewer on CNet. If they aren’t going to spend the time doing proper reviews I am not sure I need to bother checking them against the millions of blogs out there offering the same but in a better format. No wonder their traffic is slipping.
And if you were wondering I prefer Bloglines to Rojo but think Bloglines’ “related” results are next to useless.
The “next” bookmarklet feature of Google Reader is an interesting one. You never need visit your feed aggregator with it. Just hit it everytime you want to read the latest unread item in your RSS reading list and it will take you straight to the referenced page.
I think it can be improved though. For a lot of my reading list it is pretty useless. I click next, have to wait for the page to load, see if I like the page and then hit next again. Hundreds of times on a busy day. Part of the point of an aggregator is letting you quickly skim over hundreds of items looking for interesting ones to read further on.
But some feeds I know I want to read each item. e.g. a Flickr photo stream or a GMail feed. So why not let me specify a folder that the next feature works off of exclusively. Or let me create a custom next bookmarklet attached to a couple of feeds, or to a tag.
Fullfeeds.com wants you to sign a petition asking that feed providers include full articles and not just summaries in their RSS/Atom/etc. feeds.
At first glance it seems a worthy cause but after a bit of thinking I am actually not going to sign it even though I use RSS everyday and am working on an RSS project. Why? Take the BBC feeds for instance. Just summaries, no full articles. Wouldn’t it be awesome if the BBC feeds had full articles? Actually, no it wouldn’t. I use the BBC feeds just as they intend, as a way to quickly browse the news and then link through for more in depth reading of that news item. The summary serves a very specific purpose; it is a quick sound-bite of the whole article. It isn’t the same as taking a full article and displaying just the first paragraph. At least that is how it should be (the BBC feeds do just take the first paragraph. Thankfully they are well written but many articles on other sites do not have first paragraphs that summarise the whole article.)
The other factor is download size. If the BBC published full articles their feeds would be a lot weighter. On broadband on our desktops, no problem. On mobile phones with GPRS it bites. And that is where I use the BBC feeds most. Even more of a reason just to have a summary.
The petition should be that feed publishers understand the usage of their feeds fully and then make a choice. Feed publishers should not be told how to publish their feeds. Badgering them to include full articles is the wrong approach. Lets educate publishers so that they don’t fear the effect of full articles (strangely it is a good effect rather than the traffic sapping one publishers think it is.)
We won’t even go near the topic of RSS as an alert mechanism for so much more than just wordy articles.
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