FeedSeeder – Page 3 – Garrick van Buren

First Step’s the Hardest

“Success comes when you create something you want and need — and then find other people like you who agree they need and want it also.” – Rex Hammock

Consciously Overlooked

“There are lots of topics I want to track but I don’t care if I see every item.” – Steve Rubel

What Do You Think I’ll Like?

Aaron, one of the masterminds behind FeedRinse, asks that all RSS Reader provide feed-recommendations.

While I agree there is value in RSS readers making it easier to add relevant sources, my experience with the recommendation engines like Netflix and Amazon has them batting .30. It’s rare that I purchase or rent anything either of those engines think I should. It’s far more likely that I’ll be inspired by another person providing a recommendation.

It’s not the engines fault. Star-rating, past purchases, and high-level genre categories don’t provide enough information to generate a quality recommendation.

That said, RSS is a pretty good recommendation engine itself. Nothing like email, but still pretty good. It could be better sure, and I’ve got some ideas around that.

LATER:
I just received an email from Ben Moore pointing me to Tim O’Reilly’ s post about Yahoo’s new Pipes service. Ben thought there might be some similarities between Pipes and some of the projects I’m working on. Ben’s probably right (the site’s down right now).

While Pipes sounds interesting (“Pipes opens up mashup programming to the non-programmer” – Tim’s words). What’s more interesting to me is that Ben pointed me to it. A relevant, personal recommendation.
Thanks Ben.

New Year. New Approach

The FeedSeeder Project is awakening from a brief hibernation. While the core ideas will remain (they’ve even gotten more defined), the code is undergoing a rewrite (thankfullly, there wasn’t much to begin with).

First item on the To Make Better list: OPML import speed.

Rick Requests Relevance

“…I want to be able to expand a feed (or a folder) and filter the items in the reader window by tag/category…it would be really cool to be able to drill down just to the stuff that was highest value, regardless of the publisher.” – Rick Klau

Relevance Still Different than Timely

“Unlike email, every article is not necessarily something you should read, or even look at.” – Dave Winer

This is why I keep my RSS feeds and my email separate.

Undead End

After reading an article in my RSS reader, there are a number of actions I’d like to perform. All of these are about moving the ball forward. How many of these does your aggregator do easily?

Post a comment to the original article.
Email the author.
Post a reaction on your own public blog while quoting, crediting, and pinging the original article.
Email a article to someone that doesn’t read your blog.
Save the entire article to a private archive.

Aggregate Trust, Filter Relevance

“I want to subscribe to other people who I can trust, and also, who I can dial down a little” – Eric Rice

I like and trust Eric Rice…though I’m not as psyched about Second Life as he is. Same with Mark Cuban and basketball. Same with Doc Searls and photography. Same with Dave Slusher and SciFi. I subscribe to many others where there’s just the occasional interesting bit – that I gotta dig for.

Our current RSS aggregation tools don’t handle this problem very well. In fact – RSS is very different than email (just as radio is different than voicemail). All but 1 of the aggregators (share.opml.org ) I’ve played with treat them the same.

Elsewhere:

“We have always measured, instead, relevance, trust, usefulness, interest, attraction, action, value. Those are the measurements that matter, always have been, only now media must catch up to us.” – Jeff Jarvis

“I’m happy to let her sift through the left (and right) blogosphere for me and pick out the gems, that way I don’t have to read either.” – Dave Slusher

And Nobody Cares About You More Than You

“…in a world where everyone is a publication, you just can’t play favorites, you have to find a way to spread the news on your own, without help from middlemen….No reason you can’t cover your own rollout. It requires that you understand your product, have an idea how people will see it.” – Dave Winer

Read Us

“I am still waiting for someone to come to their senses in this market, and appropriately offer an RSS tool that allows me to see what the most important people in my life are reading, and what they think of it.” – Stowe Boyd