Ten Reasons Why

Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger, expresses doubt that RSS will wind up as the mainstream vehicle for syndication of content. I agree, although, for better or worse, it’s pretty much all that we have for now.

Syndication & Aggregation

I notice that whenever my aggregator (still SharpReader) grabs feeds from some blogs, the Date for each entry is represented as the time the feed was downloaded, while on other feeds the Date for each entry is represented as the time the entry was originally published (or perhaps last modified?….nope, checked my own feed, which falls into the latter category, and it’s definitely time of publication).
What’s causing this? It appears that almost all of the “Date = time the feed was grabbed” offenders (and it is offensive) are weblogs powered by Userland software, so I’m guessing this has something to do with RSS 2.0 (which is prefered by Userland) vs. RSS 1.0 (which is the default on Six Apart’s software, Movable Type and TypePad)? Or maybe it’s a finicky feature of SharpReader? Someone enlighten me.
Whatever the reason, the question remains: why in the world would I want the entry’s time/date stamp to be the time of download? How useless!

Syndication & Aggregation

Pito’s Weblog [link via Scripting News]:

I don’t think that whether Necho, RSS 2.0 or what-not is easy to use for the end user matters a wit. If we do our jobs right they will never ever see or talk about any of those.

Pito goes on to describe several phases of technological development: evangelical, tipping point, and standardization. Good analysis.

Syndication & Aggregation

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.

Syndication & Aggregation

Jim Howard (in Chris Pirillo’s excellent Lockergnome’s RSS Resource) writes about the obstacles posed to the mainstream by RSS:

We toss about terms like XML, RSS, Aggregator, Blog, and MovableType with ease, because they are the tools of our trade. We embrace them, we understand them. But for the AOL minded masses, these terms are too vague, too complicated, too boring. For these people, instant messages and email are their primary tools. Google is useful to them, because it’s simple. Email is useful for them because it allows them to forward amusing things to their friends and family, and because it is nearly omnipresent. Everyone has an email address.

Jim is absolutely right. I’ve written about this several times in recent weeks [chronologically: 1, 2, 3, 4]
The vendors of blogs and aggregators are caught up in personality wars over syndication and aggregation specs and technology, and no one is focusing on making the interfaces for syndication and aggregation appealing to the mainstream.
The somewhat arbitrary threshold I hold in the back of my mind for when I’ll know the vendors are concerned about mainstream acceptance of syndication/aggregation is when the orange XML box ceases to be the primary interface to syndication feeds. It would be difficult to think of a symbol that is more meaningless and off-putting to the non-technical user than a blaze orange acronym for a mark-up language. :-/

Syndication & Aggregation

SharpReader, which I enjoy using immensely, has started leaking memory like a sieve with release 0.9.2. It was already a memory hog, sucking up more than 60 megs of memory regularly, but with 0.9.2, it began sucking up every last bit of available memory. Sigh. I emailed Luke this morning, but in the meantime I have an unusable aggregator and miss my feeds. Rolling back to version 0.9.1.3 alleviated the problem leakage problem . . . but 50-75 megs of memory is still too much for an aggregator to use.
So I’m shopping around for a new aggregator for Windows. Someone at the MERLOT conference recommended Awasu, but it appears their freebie version doesn’t include support for importing subscriptions from an OPML file, and I don’t feel like paying just to find out whether it can handle the 150+ subscriptions better than SharpReader.
Recommendations?
UPDATE (5:00pm): I purged an enormous amount (thousands) of old posts from SharpReader and that brought it’s memory footprint down to about 54 megs. Could it be that SharpReader is loading the entire feed for each subscription into memory?!? That would be crazy! Yet it appears that the amount of memory SharpReader consumes is somehow related to the number of posts in each feed. :-/

Syndication & Aggregation

Jason Kottke has fallen prey to the siren’s lure of the “human readability” argument:

“If hardcore developers of RSS readers and authoring tools are the only ones technically savvy enough to understand RSS files, the pool of potential memes is limited by the size and narrow focus (not to mention, for the most part, gender) of that group. But if the format is fairly human readable (more like HTML 3.2 markup than, say, Perl code), you’re going to get more people from different backgrounds hacking away at it.”

I posted a pretty extensive response on Jason’s blog, which for my loyal readers (both of you), I have repeated here.

Read more…

Syndication & Aggregation

More on simplicity vs. complexity in RSS in Battle of the blog, an article on C|net.

Syndication & Aggregation

Vis a vis the discussion taking place around this earlier post, here are comments from Robin Good on The Death Of The Webmaster: Why Weblogs Bring A True Revolution To Internet Publishing [link via Doc Searls]:

It has never been to no-one enjoyment to have to go through through lengthy, and not intuitive procedures to simply make some new text appear on a certain page of your site.

Robin goes on to list all the advantages of using content management technology to make the tag-level formatting irrelevant to content author . . . and, by doing so, bring about the demise of the traditional “webmaster” whose role was to take all the content provided by authors and massage it into something presentable via the web.
Provides good fodder for the previous discussion of why “human readability” of formats and expectations of hand-coding by typical consumers (not necessarily developers) should go the way of the dinosaurs and Commodores. Well worth a read.

Syndication & Aggregation

Stephen Downes has written a tutorial on How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer.
Here’s a simpler tutorial:
1. Get a weblog tool that supports RSS.
2. Write.
3. Let the weblog tool do the RSS work.

Read more…

Syndication & Aggregation, Weblogs