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

News Readers and Aggregators

Discussion leader: Jon Udell, InfoWorld
Agenda: Quick survey of representative sample of RSS readers, thoughts on what’s next, discussion.

Jon’s remarks: It all boils down to ease of use. A click per item is a non-starter, because that’s too many clicks. It’s partly to help you read and be informed, partly about collaboration. How do you turn it around, to look at something in your feed and use it as a basis of writing, send it back out. Tools talked about:

• Radio: It’s the one I (Jon) use. Lets you choose how many items to view on a page.
• NetNewsWireLite: the free version online, there’s also a pro version.
• Newsgator: Really cool the way it plugs into Outlook, the foldering mechanism. Unfortunately, the search function in Outlook sucks.
• SharpReader: Example of a three-pane aggregator. I don’t find the content panel that useful.

Audience comments:

• Skip Dodson, Ohio Edublogging: I use Radio a lot. I use it as a filing system. I can read down the list, file that stuff by publishing it to my weblog, and look at it later.
• Amy Wohl: I use NewsGator as a filing system.
• Jeremy Peterson, fakebanana.com: I use a Mac tool called Devonthink. It lets you do some automatic sorting of posts.
• Stephen Delaney: Waypath is an interesting tool. It takes the context of an article, searches its database, and returns other articles it thinks might be relevant.
• Betsy Devine: I want an aggregator that works like Tivo. I want it to give me two choices: Here are the pages you said you wanted–here is a much shorter list of pages I think you really want, based on the stories you have clicked in the past. [Jon: Or it could just let you sort the pages based on something like Tivo.]
• Dave Winer: There are still jobs being done by actual human beings. It’s our job as technologists to make it possible for them to do their work well.
• How can I see what other people are reading, even if they’re not writing anything?
• Jon Udell: Should the newsreader pay more attention to what I’m reading and keep track of it? And if so, how widely should it make that information available. My aggregator knows a lot about me, or at least it could.
• Amy Wohl: Don’t confuse expertise and popularity. It’s easy to find out what web pages are popular. If you want to know what experts in a field are reading, that’s more difficult to find out.
• Werner Vogels: These are very hot questions in computer research. The question of what experts are reading is called “reputation systems.”
• Jenny Levine, Shifted Librarian: I’m not concerned with keeping it private what I’m aggregating. That information makes my weblog more useful, and I think that’s a good trade-off for privacy.
• Jeremy Peterson: If you look at Napster, you can see that people are willing to make the tradeoff of privacy in return for more information.
• Chris Jackson: People are talking about newsreader software that makes some decisions for you–that’s the function of the human brain. I’m not sure that function is easy to put into software.
• Amy Wohl: There’s also an economic problem. The aggregator market is not strong enough to generate a lot of feature-rich software.
• Werner Vogels: At this point, it’s a bit crummy. Yes, you can see all those items on a single page–wonderful! But we need different metaphors for the user interface. It’s also going to run into problems as there are more and more blogs to scan, and also more and more newsreaders hitting them every half hour.
• Jeremy Peterson: One thing privacy advocates stress is that it’s more than know who is collecting your information–you care about what they’re doing with that information.
• Dean Landsmann: I use Bloglines, because it’s so simple. I see it not so much as an aggregator as an extra page of Favorites. But on my own blog–I found the rss feed only because some nice person at Userland showed me. You have an orange button saying “XML” and another one with XML and a coffee cup. The instructions for using it are unusable. This is a train wreck!
• Jon Udell: The hugest commercial outlet for newsreader is as an alternative to email. You post a change to your blog and it notifies you by email–how broken is that? Your newsreader is giving you a spam-free, subscription-based, opt-in information channel–use it! Think about getting an RSS update from your refrigerator.
• Dean Landsmann: It’s called SMS–I have a phone that gets that information.
• Amy Wohl: I don’t want to confuse reading my email, which I must act on, with reading my RSS feed, which I do when I have time to think about it. I don’t want my refrigerator’s failure to show up in the RSS feed.
• Werner Vogels: RSS works to fetch “state.” You go to your refrigerator and poll it to see what its state is. Notifying is something different.
• Scott Johnson: Yahoo groups is now RSS-able. There’s also a service in India that lets you get email as RSS. Of course, that is also spam-able.
• Carol Dotson: Mailbucket lets you get email as an RSS feed.

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For a much more complete account of the aggregator discussion, see Roland Tanglao’s weblog. He also has a lot of good stuff on earlier sessions.

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