Types of Aggregators
Dave Winer on types of aggregators:
There are two schools of thought about aggregators. One says that they should work like a mail reader, the other that it should work like a weblog. The former shows you each feed as a separate thing, the latter shows all articles in reverse-chronologic order, grouping them by time. Imho we already have enough mail readers, wire up RSS to email and you’re done. Who needs another piece of software to do what an already-existing category does so well. But the latter, which is the approach I used in Radio’s aggregator, works incredibly well. People who are just using mail-reader style aggregators are really missing something. Articles that only write about mail reader aggregators are also missing something.
Dave’s right about the broad schools of thought, but wrong about the value of what he calls the “weblog-style” aggregators.
The best aggregators allow the user the flexibility to read a feed individually, as part of a group of feeds (defined by the user), or the entire collection of feeds. Not to mention filtering, searching, etc. For many (and probably overwhelmingly most) people, “weblog-style” isn’t very efficient for filtering through or scanning thousands of posts from hundreds of subscriptions. There’s a reason most aggregators use an email-like approach: it’s an interface that has proven effective at managing large amounts of information for billions of users.
There were many reasons I abandoned Radio, not the least of them being the utter un-usability of its aggregator component for managing information. Locking the user into that one mode of information presentation is one reason (among several) that Radio Userland is not one of the best aggregators.
I tend to agree, with the caveat that I did like the way that RUl provided a reader integrated with weblog. That wasn’t enough to get me to go with Radio–I much prefer Movable Type. But I am still frustrated at getting a reader that integrates smoothly with my current setup. Any suggestions for a reader that a not-particularly-tech-oriented-but-literate-with-a-good-manual blogger could integrate with MT?
The RU aggregator is not for me either. But how many other weblog services even offer an aggregator? Radio has some great technology and the aggregator issue is easily resolved. SocialDynamX is on its way to resolving it.
Hmm. I don’t see any significant benefit to having content aggregation integrated with my weblog authoring tool. So enlighten me — what’s the benefit?
The only benefit I can think of is improving the ease of publishing an item in the aggregator to your weblog, but that doesn’t require much. E.g. SharpReader has a BlogThis URL plug-in for Movable Type that lets you right-click on an item and send it to your “Post to MT Weblog” page.
Besides, I think what will improve the ease of publishing items from an aggregator to a weblog isn’t necessarily direct integration of the two tools — which likely locks you into one vendor’s product — stability of the specs and APIs that are caught up in the personality wars.
Aggregation and authoring are separate (but perhaps loosely related) processes. I’d rather be able to use the aggregator of my choice with the weblog authoring tool of my choice through stable interfaces.
Yes, the benefit for me of integration would be one-click publishing. I have to admit I am somewhat technologically hobbled because I am using an Earthlink account. Earthlink uses the basic, minimal version of PERL required to run Movable Type. This means that some features of MT (like Trackback) don’t work correctly on my system. This appears to be true of one-click publishing as well. I could switch ISPs, but this would involve some complications I’d rather avoid. But without the one-click option, I’m basically cutting and pasting urls when I use an aggregator. I know, it’s still better than blind surfing, but I can’t help thinking how useful it could be to design an aggregator to work hand-in-glove with the weblog software.
Your point about flexibility is certainly valid, of course. Perhaps what we are seeing here is the difference between a tech-savvy user (Greg) and a user who muddles through the tech stuff (me). If my past record is any indication, I’ll poke around for a while and eventually figure out a reader setup that meets my needs.
I’ll check out SharpReader and see if I can get it to work for me. Thanks for the suggestion.