Tag Archives: RSS

Sean Blanda on Remixing the News

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eMedia: Remix the News: “Remix the News: what news can learn from Last.fm and Pandora”: “there is no service that adequately customizes content to my tastes based on previous reading”

A good read with some important ideas. The only thing close I can think of is Google Reader’s recommendations which are based upon my clicking activity in Google Reader.

One of the commenters in Sean’s post added some thoughts about ‘intelligent serendipity’. ‘Intelligent Serendipity’ will be all important if we intend to help people get the news they need to hear, but might not be aware of it.

Some links on ‘intelligent serendipity’:

Jeff Jarvis: “Serendipity is unexpected relevance”

Chis Anderson: “What would it take to build a true “serendipity-maker”?”

Mathew Ingram: “In defence of newspapers and serendipity”

Inside Guardian.com: “The Random Guardian”

Somewhere in here is the news experience of the future. Helping people connect with what they are interested in, and helping them connect with what they would (should?) be interested in, but just aren’t aware of it yet. Isn’t that the essence of ‘news’?

Emptied Bloglines account

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On Friday, in a moment of either clarity…or something else… I removed all of my subscriptions from Bloglines. I had grown frustrated with my habit of checking a few times an hour for updates. I’ve mentioned before that Memeorandum is like crack. Well Bloglines is like cigarettes.

One thing I immediately miss is keeping up with my friends across the web. I feel partially disconnected. But at the same time, I’ve found myself more focused.

This isn’t an anti-RSS screed. I’m thinking there is something about Bloglines that, for me, makes it too easy to distract myself from what’s important.

So, what comes next…. hmmmmm….

Full feeds versus partial feeds

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Lots of folks out there take a hard line when it comes to publishing either full feeds (the entire contents of each post being published in RSS/Atom) or partial feeds.

Scoble, for example, is famous for declaring he won’t subscribe to anyone’s partial feed.

Shelley and Rafe have posted thoughtful takes on this, from either side of the fence.

My take? Well I publish a full feed. But for the longest time I didn’t. It hasn’t made a difference as far as my readership is concerned one way, or another, because this is such a personal space for me.

‘There is more than one way to do it’ should not only be the motto of Perl, but the motto of the web. There is room for both approaches – and many more. We’ve mostly gotten each other speaking the same language (hey I know that’s arguable), but to argue that there is only ‘one true way’ to publish the sentences misses the beauty of the web.

The NYTimes planning an aggregator?

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OJR: GrayLady.com: NY Times explodes wall between print, Web

At the Times, Nisenholtz has ambitions to super-charge the Web site and take it beyond the realm of newspaper sites and into the top tier of news sites online. He told me he envisioned multimedia reports going from two to three reports per day to 30 or 40 reports daily, while also building out a new aggregation service that would take on Google News.

“Google News was the fastest growing news site in the first six months of the year,” Nisenholtz said. “So we have to be as good as anyone else at doing that and meanwhile put in our own Times special sauce — which is our journalism — that will always differentiate us. If you look at those as the two pillars of our future, you can think about how we’re approaching this next phase. Weblogs are great, they’re part of the information universe, and people ought to have access to them, and we should make that access as seamless as possible.”