The Problem With Feeds
December 5th, 2008 by Erik
RSS feeds fail when you subscribe to multiple feeds covering the same general topic area. Consider Alltop’s coverage of Social Media. There are a lot of great stories provided by a huge number of great blogs, but what is the community currently buzzing about? The Zeitgeist for the vertical is missing. Each blog has it’s own tag cloud, but what about the industry as a whole? I wrote about duplication of stories before in my post about the Social Media News Glut. However, the real problem is with RSS or, more specifically, how the current generation of readers uses RSS. Readers are essentially dumb clients providing lists of content based on a time stamp within the feeds to which the user has subscribed.
Google News, breaks this read and regurgitate mold and provides an aggregation of stories based on their content. However, as a user, you can’t create a list of authoritative blogs you want aggregated into a single feed – the personalization and customization is missing. I want the alltop blogs for Social Media blended with a Google news engine providing all coverage of a topic as a series of news items and related stories. I want to get into the long tail of Social Media coverage. Even at this level, duplication still occurs and so grouping of stories would save me time.
The difference between this and Google News as it exists today, is my ability to provide content areas that I find interesting. So I can mix my Social Media news in with my PHP news to get a news source that’s highly specific to me but without duplication. The technology to do this isn’t new. Twitscoop for example attempts to tame the twitter beast by seeing what emerging trends exist and generating a tag cloud for popular terms. Google Trends does some similar work as well. Since the technology already exists, it seems almost trivial to generate an RSS reader that aggregates similar stories. I suspect an online tool, perhaps even Google PageRank, could provide some level of sorting to determine which blog is more authoritative on a specific topic, providing the best version of a specific story, while including the ability to drill down to each original source if the reader is so inclined.
Google may be heading in this direction already with their News product. Customization in the recommended for and geographic sections is evidence of this. However, I can’t add my list of feeds to the Google news engine.
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December 5th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
This is one side of the problem – the consumption side. You present a problem that I think needs to be tackled soon – mainly because of the other side of the equation (see below). Google Reader could probably adopt some of Google News’ algorithms and aggregate stories, but the sophistication of Feed Readers is going to have to improve drastically.
The other side of the equation is the supply of feeds. Blogs, news sites, and friend activity (facebook, twitter) have this figured out, most of them have RSS feeds. But a lot of other things in our lives do not have feeds – house temperature, car oil levels, specials at a favorite restaurant etc’
I think that we are heading towards a future where RSS readers are going to become much more sophisticated – the new PageRank as you suggest, that will need to sift through tons of feeds that are relevant to you – both in the online and offline world, and in all facets of our lives. And I can’t wait for this!
December 5th, 2008 at 11:59 pm
Good point about feeds increasing, but until we can consume them, I don’t think they’ll be useful. Perhaps it’s a simple question of the Chicken or the Egg. One follows the other, continually improving through iteration.