RSS Readering: Part II. Get Real: Stowe Boyd's Soapbox

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Stowe Boyd is a well-known media subversive, and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative and social technologies. His new blog is Message.

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December 13, 2005

RSS Readering: Part II

Posted by Stowe Boyd

The response to my recent piece on RSS 'readering' (see RSS Readering: Why RSS Readers Are No Good For Me (And You, Too, I Bet)) has been really overwhelming. I thought I would wander through some of the comments and recommendations that folks sent along, as well as describing some new tools that have cropped up that I am trying out.

Todd Tweedy pointed out that the recent release of AIM supports media bots pushed into the buddylist, without any opt-in by the user. He suggests that in the future AOL may not let you delete these bots, and that's bad, if it turns out to be true. Note: despite for my calls of an integration between RSS readering and the buddylist, I have had no response from anyone working on IM for one of the major IM players. Sigh.

Anil Bawa responded with a description of some of the things he has implemented in Clippr which was his master's thesis project at Imperial University. Clippr is a really cool prototype, but not open for general use:
[from the Clippr.]
Show me the money
Here's the feature list:
- OPML import/export of feed subscriptions. Folders are flattened to tags and imported automatically into Clippr.
- Firefox plug-in and bookmarklet to facilitate clipping stuff from your web browser.
- Tag clippings, tag feeds, tag like a demon.
- A community oriented article base formed through user subscriptions, refreshed periodically. Full text RSS/RDF/ATOM formatted feeds are supported.
- Text analysis (article clustering) on incoming articles, in order to extract Top Stories and article keywords.
- Context analysis (tag clustering) used to recognise related tags.
- Change your tags whenever you want. Clippr handles merging/splitting of tag-spaces.
- Power editing using batch actions thanks to a gmail style dynamic dropdown.
- Tagging combined with keyword extraction to produce automated classification of articles. Text analysis and folksonomy reconciled.
- A search engine supporting a query syntax for folksonomy - search by tag (intersection/union), feed, keyword or any combination of these. Implemented as Live Search for desktop style responsiveness (it behaves like Apple Mail search - wipe the search field and return to where you were)
- RIS export for using web references in bibliographies
- RSS export of your Clippings archive.
- Mail an article to a friend or recommend it to a fellow Clippr user.
Hot damn, I thought. So I contacted Anil, and we spoke this last weekend. He is interested in pursuing the ideas in Clippr, but the system isn't really scaled to handle more than maybe a dozen users at the moment, so he'd have to rethink it and reimplement if he wants to go forward with it. But he is plotting doing something in this area, so I have dubbed him a new voice, and plan to keep my eyes on him. I also plan to meet him when I jump to Europe in the new year.

Danzigstorer turned me on to the Maxthon browser, which I had never heard about even though it has had 30 million downloads. I haven't had a chance to fiddle with it, or review its many plugins, but there may be something there. More to follow. He also mentioned Sharpreader, a Windows only RSS reader tool that plays nice with W.bloggar, apparently.

Ian Kennedy of Yahoo pointed out that the announced Yahoo Alerts integration with Yahoo Messenger is now working. I will look into that later today.

Dylan mentioned both You Control for the Mac, which basically allows the user to put all sorts of controls into the menu bar, like being able to open folders, recent documents, iCal events, and this includes a small RSS reader. Looks interesting, but I stumbled across RSS Menu first, so You Control loses out.

RSS Menu is a simple program that allows you to display RSS feeds from a menu on the Mac menu bar. The tool supports folders, so that feeds can be logically aggregated. And when you mouse over a specific post, there is a hover display of the story excerpt. The feeds and folders display unread items. Its a very minimal but usable RSS jumping-off point, which is what I really want. As I said in the earlier piece, I don't really want to park in a reader, and have posts pushed at me one by one. I usually jump to a post, then from there to other things linked, and so on.

This would be reason enough for me to adopt RSS Menu. Having the RSS feeds always available in the Mac menu is a huge advantage -- I don't have to switch from email to a newsreader, for example. I just reach up, scroll down the list and see if there is something I want to read. If so, I click on the item, and there I am.

Even more importantly, relative to my desire to be alerted about new stuff, RSS Menu is integrated with Growl, another Mac program that I knew nothing about until the past week. Growl's creators call it a "global notification system for Mac" -- and the product can be used to notify Mac users about all sorts of system and application activities. In my case, I have turned on notifications for new RSS feeds and Gmail.

Now, whenever someone I read posts something new, I get a floating, transient tombstone in the upper right corner of my desktop, indicating the name of the feed. I can -- if I want -- pull down the RSS Menu and slide over to see what it is without having to change context from one program to another. I emphasize that last point because it's very big for me.

So, that's a big digression in response to Dylan's recommendation about You Control -- perhaps should have been a post all on its own -- but needless to say, one piece of the puzzle that I wrote about in RSS Readering Part I has been mostly satisfied.

Just Mohit and Pablo Ibarrolaza suggested I try Bloglines, but that's the inward looking sort of RSS reader experience I don't want. I have already tried Bloglines.

Michael suggests using email alerts, and use the standard email filtering/foldering approach. Gack. I don't want to spend more time in email, I want support for an active, blogging-by-wandering-around style of RSS readering.

Greg Cangiolosi pointed me toward immedi.at, which is an RSS-to_IM alert solution. More to follow, once I test drive it.

Julian Ellison says that his group is going to take at least some of my recommendations to heart:

Seriously, we're digging into this in our Tablane browser. Won't help you yet because we're based on the IE engine in our current incarnation (sorry), but in our next beta release due out before the end of the month we are adapting our (bookmark) Collections XML framework to comply with the RSS XML standard. This should give us a platform to pursue some of these ideas.
Another browser I had never heard of! Yikes.

Mark Wilson suggests that a website might be a better place for dealing with RSS feeds than a reader, and he and his (unnamed) group are apparently at work on something like that. He points to Microsoft.com as his website in the comment, so...

A number of folks referenced the piece and extended the ideas. Here's a sampling (see Technorati, or the trackbacks on the post):

Jack Vinson picked up the thread and wrote:
Why RSS Readers Are No Good For Stowe
Stowe doesn't want the email-like interface of Outlook plugins, nor does he want the "Pez dispenser feel" of many of the browser-based aggregators (click to read). He goes on to describe a set of features that describes a more natural way of reading the wide array of web feeds that are available today. Such a tool will let him say "this is interesting" and immediately research other materials: trace through links, read comments (and visit commenters), browse through tags, and even find people in my network who know something about the topic. And one might even want to write about the topic in question.

One can almost see pieces of this in the various blog and web search feeds that are available. But they mostly require that I wait to see how the search develops over time. I wonder if what Findory is doing with monitoring my clicks might help over the long haul.

Here's an example: While I am reading, I would like to have a "more like this" option that pulls together materials in my existing feeds that are related to "this." It also goes out to the web and brings back other related materials, maybe via a gada.be-like tool that fires off multiple searches for me. And it should be smart enough to ignore things I have already seen or that I already know about (one of my frustrations with blog search feeds).

Ian Kennedy said that I laid down
a challenge for RSS readers to do better with some suggestions for improvement which I think make sense.

I think that's the attraction of Memeorandum - we're usually lazy and want to give over control to someone else to sort out the top news of the day. In Memorandum if a story is really talked about, it'll remain the top story all day, there's no worry in missing that one post, it'll remain pegged up there until you're ready for it. Reading your feeds (forgive me, I'm going to take a shot at my own analogy) should be more like taking in an expansive view of the landscape and not like weeding a garden. As Yahoo continues to think about how best to bring RSS to the masses, this is something we continue to think about.
Scoble commented on my post, which I talked about at length, here, but the real difference is, as I said, "My process of reading stuff is not random, but it is not assembly-line, industrial-strength blog reading like Robert is into. I find that I need to tag, comment, post, and so on, to make sense of the stream. Otherwise, nothing sticks with me."

Andy Lark said he shares my feelings, which I already noted.

Paolo Valdemarin says that I am a mutant, but I may be a precursor of what others will do in the future: "I don't know how many users in the world wild web would actually be using an approach similar to Stowe's to dig information today, but I think his list of features could be an interesting foundation to improve tools for intranet-level applications."

Whew. A lot of discussion, a lot of tools to try out, and some measurable success -- specifically with the combination of Growl and RSS Menu -- getting toward what I want. But I still haven't uncovered the various modules that I talked about in RSS Readering Part I, and most of what people seem to be building are new applications that are trying to impose a different context on my RSS readering activities instead of supporting me where I am now: in the browser looking at some post. Tool builders need to drop the premise that we want to sit in a tiny little room (the app) and read snippets of text in an assembly-line fashion. I favor a pre-industrial, hunter-gatherer model of web reading: I wander around, looking under rocks and finding new trails all the time. And telling stories about my travels so that I, and others, can find the way back, and, just as important: to learn from the experience.

Comments (31) + TrackBacks (0) | Category: Technology

COMMENTS

1. Peter on December 13, 2005 01:17 PM writes...

Hi. Thanks for your post about immedi.at. I'd be happy to talk with you further about our goals and hopes and dreams for a highly focused little application. It's still in beta but has come a long way since released a few months back. We're just now offering a way for blog and website owners to freely and easily connect with their readers over IM.

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December 13, 2005

RSS Readering: Part II

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