Re: [syndication] Re: Channel 3475 - Please advise

[Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>]

Devil's advocate - 

As RSS, aggregation, etc. gets more popular, finding channels won't
be done by going to directories, hotlists, etc. Instead, people will
find RSS files that they're interested in the same way they find out
about other content which appeals to them; through friends, e-mail,
Web sites they visit, etc.

After all, why set up an entire new infrastructure for finding
content, just because that content takes a different form (Web pages
vs. RSS feeds)? Right now it might be appealing because there are
relatively few channels, so people have to hunt for them. If there's
a channel for every content source on the Internet, having a master
ratings engine/hotlist/etc might be a job for somebody like Yahoo,
but why make it part of RSS itself?

I'd much rather see effort expended on clean ways to integrate RSS
into content sources, so that, unlike my.netscape and IE active
channels, the *user* chooses their aggregation engine, and they press
a button on a page to make it work.

Cheers,


On Sun, Feb 11, 2001 at 08:56:27PM +0000, Julian Bond wrote:
> In article <298b01c0944b$96faa2c0$33a1dc40@murphy2>, Dave Winer
> <dave@userland.com> writes
> >If a channel is inactive after seven days, we drop it from the list, but we
> >keep reading it every day, and if it changes, it goes back on the list and
> >we resume hourly scans.
> >
> >So the workaround is to update every six days to be sure you don't fall off
> >our radar.
> 
> It feels like there must be many weekly newsletters out there that
> update every seven days. Would it hurt to change your rules to 8 and 7
> days?
> 
> >The reason we limited it is because the list was getting huge and much of
> >the stuff was inactive.
> 
> The inactivity is a shame, but the hugeness is inevitable, isn't it?
> 
> I'll quote it again.
> 
> "This is the biggest problem-opportunity in RSS space. Discovery can be
> overwhelming. Too many channels, too hard to find the good ones. We need
> curators and critics -- people who appreciate a good channel. Let's also
> learn what makes a channel good. What's your favorite and why? As the
> tools get better we'll be asking these kinds of questions."
> 
> We need categorization, and maybe ratings/hotlists. This can only get
> worse than it looks! 
> 
> -- 
> Julian Bond mail:julian@netmarketseurope.com
> workurl:http://www.netmarketseurope.com
> weblog:http://roguemoon.manilasites.com
> ICQ:33679668 Tel:+44 (0)20 7420 4363
> tag: So many words, so little time
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Mark Nottingham
http://www.mnot.net/