5 March 2006 · matching rem
[An idea arising (or maybe coalescing) from a conversation with Pito Salas of BlogBridge about "feed remixing".]
Del.icio.us/popular and Digg, at the moment, produce feeds and are probably heavily fed by people who read feeds, but still rely on a workflow that requires browsing: I read something interesting in one of my feeds, I go to the web page it represents, I bookmark/Digg that web page, a bunch of people do the same, and when it crosses some threshold of popularity it hits del.icio.us/popular or the Digg front page, or whatever. Those pages in turn then generate feeds, which I read. This flow makes excellent sense if I want to bookmark the thing persistently, or I want to annotate my bookmarking of it, or participate in a discussion about it. But sometimes all I ever want to do is read it and pass it on.
Maybe there should be a way to simply bypass the browsing stages. When you read something interesting in a feed, you could Figg the feed article itself. Your stream of Figged articles from all your feeds forms a new personal compilation feed, and those personal feeds are then aggregated and collated, and the most popularly Figged articles appear in a collaboratively generated new feed. This is just a flow, so it would be my recommendation to leave persistence and annotation and tagging and commentary all to the other model. Keep it to a single function requiring no other per-action parameters, whose output is just a normalized feed with articles uniquely IDed by source. The aggregation could either be centralized (i.e., as a service that also provides hosting for the personal feeds), or decentralized (you host your own personal feed, and just register it with the aggregation service).
Note that I'm not claiming this is a business idea, nor do I even think it's a durable idea in structural terms. It won't surprise me much if feeds, in their current form, go straight from early-adopter obscurity to being obviated or subsumed or reintegrated back into a new form of browsing. But for now these possibilities are part of this idea's appeal -- for a little while the technology of feeds still happens to define a community and an audience, and Figg could be the ultimate insiders' channel.
[If the main point of this is single-click-ness, it would require blog-reader integration, but several RSS readers already have Blog-This functions, and this would be simpler.]
["Feedmarking" would have been a great name for this idea, but that term is already being used to talk about the marking/tagging of feeds. Of course "bookmarking" was originally the marking of pages within books rather than the marking of books, but on the web this distinction doesn't exactly hold.]
Del.icio.us/popular and Digg, at the moment, produce feeds and are probably heavily fed by people who read feeds, but still rely on a workflow that requires browsing: I read something interesting in one of my feeds, I go to the web page it represents, I bookmark/Digg that web page, a bunch of people do the same, and when it crosses some threshold of popularity it hits del.icio.us/popular or the Digg front page, or whatever. Those pages in turn then generate feeds, which I read. This flow makes excellent sense if I want to bookmark the thing persistently, or I want to annotate my bookmarking of it, or participate in a discussion about it. But sometimes all I ever want to do is read it and pass it on.
Maybe there should be a way to simply bypass the browsing stages. When you read something interesting in a feed, you could Figg the feed article itself. Your stream of Figged articles from all your feeds forms a new personal compilation feed, and those personal feeds are then aggregated and collated, and the most popularly Figged articles appear in a collaboratively generated new feed. This is just a flow, so it would be my recommendation to leave persistence and annotation and tagging and commentary all to the other model. Keep it to a single function requiring no other per-action parameters, whose output is just a normalized feed with articles uniquely IDed by source. The aggregation could either be centralized (i.e., as a service that also provides hosting for the personal feeds), or decentralized (you host your own personal feed, and just register it with the aggregation service).
Note that I'm not claiming this is a business idea, nor do I even think it's a durable idea in structural terms. It won't surprise me much if feeds, in their current form, go straight from early-adopter obscurity to being obviated or subsumed or reintegrated back into a new form of browsing. But for now these possibilities are part of this idea's appeal -- for a little while the technology of feeds still happens to define a community and an audience, and Figg could be the ultimate insiders' channel.
[If the main point of this is single-click-ness, it would require blog-reader integration, but several RSS readers already have Blog-This functions, and this would be simpler.]
["Feedmarking" would have been a great name for this idea, but that term is already being used to talk about the marking/tagging of feeds. Of course "bookmarking" was originally the marking of pages within books rather than the marking of books, but on the web this distinction doesn't exactly hold.]