Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

You know something you want is somewhere in RSS*–but how the heck do you find it?

The blogroll model picked up by aggregators is what I call “friend-centered.” You tell the aggregator who your friends are, and it tells you when somebody on your list posts.

The Feedster** model is what I call “topic-centered.” You search for a word or phrase that interests you, and Feedster returns any posts that include your topic–often posts made within the past few minutes.

Both models are useful. Most of us have friends as well as topics of interest! And a lot of people put the two models together by treating their Feedster topic-search as a friend and subscribing to its RSS feed in their aggregator.

Now, thanks to some very hard work by Scott Johnson, you can integrate friends-and-topics in a new way, using Feedster’s new web-based aggregator. (I did some beta-testing on “myFeedster” as it was developed, and I love it.)

The myFeedster aggregator lets you add blogs and newsfeeds to your subscription list directly from the results of a Feedster search. In other words, people who care about the same topics you do can get added easily to your list of friends.

IMO, Feedster just added a very important piece to the RSS-information-finding puzzle.

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* RSS (Really Simple Syndication) lets bloggers and newsfolk publish a “feed” to let readers know about updates when they happen. Readers find out that you said something new when (using a friend-centered or a topic-centered method) they’re checking the state of many feeds at once–not two weeks later, when they have leisure time for brower-surfing.

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** Feedster is a web-based platform for collecting, searching, managing and delivering RSS content.

At least that’s how I describe it, though I’d probably better quote Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! Finance here–he invented my favorite-ever blog disclaimer: “In case it’s not already obvious, I don’t speak for my employer on my personal web site. Do you know anyone who does?”

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