David reviews Glaser on RSS. In a word: Oy.
Mark Glaser's "10 Steps to Making Really Satisfying Syndication" are really worth reading. If he represents a user who is well-informed about RSS, we have a lot of work to do to better explain the technology and its uses. Glaser writes:
3. Automatically rank all posts or stories depending on how other people rate them, or by how many other people read them. Some sites such as Digg
or Daily RSS
5. When pulling up one particular source, such as New York Times Technology or BuzzMachine, let me order the posts by Most Relevant to my preferences, or Most Popular by other readers, or Most Commented On (if they are blog posts with comments). That gives me a better idea of what I should read.
Cool idea, but wouldn't that mean (1) that you'd set up these preferences for sorting of your feeds and (2) that the feed should only be updated at long, regular intervals so that ranking/popularity data can accumulate? Wouldn't that potentially ruin the immediacy of RSS?
…or is he talking about feed readers/aggregators that are designed to sort your reading list (either from a single feed or a group of feeds) by some sort of metadata included in each feed's every post? Not clear on how he believes this should be accomplished.
2. Recommend stories or posts depending on my preferences. Give more personalization features that let me filter the barrage of reading material in a meaningful way based on what types of information I want and my mood. For instance, today I might want an emphasis on sports and business and tomorrow I might want updates on the War on Terror and political policy.
4. Show me related posts. As I’m reading, if I find a story that I particularly like, I’d like to see blogs that refer to that story or other stories that are similar to that one.
6. Learn my preferences dynamically. Based on what I read and click on over time, the RSS reader could start to order my sources and the articles by my past behavior. This is a similar functionality to the personalized news site, Findory
How can the feed or the feed's creator learn the user's preferences? Again, this would have to be a function of the reader/aggregator.
I don’t want the feed reader to add more time to my reading day — I want to subtract the searching, the yearning, the culling, the off-topic tangents that take me away from what I want.
10. Block news I don’t want. Maybe I’m tired of news from Iraq or the World Cup, or I’ve taped the Oscars on my DVR and don’t want to know who won them yet. Create a “block news” feature that lets me block news stories or blog posts on these topics that I don’t want to see.
First, this isn't a problem with the technology, this is a problem with Glaser's choice of feeds. Second, if a user really wants to streamline the posts he/she actually sees, there are aggregators to download and install on one's machine that will filter yone's results, or you can use something like Feedrinse and filter the feed before it even reaches your aggregator.
7. Tangent warnings. If I start to read articles or blog posts that are not in my preferred subject areas, the RSS reader should warn me in a polite but firm way that I am going off on a tangent and need to focus.
…..I actually don't know what to say to this. Glaser wants nanny software that reminds him to concentrate?
9. Highlight hot topics. A computer algorithm could search through all the stories I subscribe to (and perhaps related ones online) and find the hot topics that people are writing about and create a running list of these.
There are already many services that rank big news stories (see Google News) or big topics in blogs (see Tailrank).
While I'm picking nits:
You then use a news reader — either software or web-based — to look at all your sites at a glance.
I dislike Glaser's implication that RSS is (exclusively) for syndicating web sites, and I dislike his calling the software one uses to read feeds a "news reader." There's so much more one can do with an RSS reader than get the latest headlines from Yahoo News. I like "aggregator", "feed reader", or even "reader," but "News Reader" gives a mistaken impression of what the application is for.
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July 6th, 2006 at 7:30 pm
I haven’t RTFA, but no matter, because I am more interested in your response, Mr. Rothman. It points out a tension rarely expressed on blogs about librarianship, which tend to buy into the “give ‘em what they want…and more!” line of delivering library services. Any notion that library (or, in this instance, “information technology”) users might need to bone up just a bit on the tools they use is anathema. Users have acquired “expectations” from Amazon and Google, for instance, that libraries must satisfy in order to succeed, so the argument goes. And the latest neat yet unproven mechanism for such satisfaction is “social networking” applications: blogs, wikis, folksonomies, and the like. And of course RSS.
But you show how users who don’t understand a technology’s limitations need to be coaxed into understanding them if they are going to reap the technology’s benefits. I wish this message were more widely expressed (although I’m sure it is widely held, if only tacitly). I wish we wouldn’t so gullibly consume the utter silliness dished out–now for decades–by AI proponents and their cognitive scientist cognates. These are nifty realms for boys and their toys, but the promise and the performance are remote coordinates in these fields. Yet we’re urged, like Glaser, to believe that technology will not merely help us to make decisions (that is, only if we’re very careful when we deploy it), but that it will make the decision for us. And if it’s really good, technology will resolve our problems even before we knew we had them, thus dispensing with any sense that we have “preferences” at all.
July 13th, 2006 at 7:18 pm
[...] Interfaces & Expectations of Users - In this post David Rothman responds to comments from an earlier post. He argues that Amazon has a good interface because people can quickly find what they need - and that this is how OPACs should work. David also expresses some skepticism about the usefulness of “social applications” as library tools - believing they may best serve as tools for outreach. [...]
July 18th, 2006 at 6:19 am
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