EirePreneur

Blogjects will kill off Feed Aggregators

Most of us don't consider ourselves edge cases (though we clearly are) so we're quite content to use traditional Feed Aggregators, which piously wed us to our information spouses. You can't 'play the field' with this software - if you want a relationship you must sign the subscription contract.

Polygamy is acceptable and even expected but you must go through a ceremony with each new data partner. And once you're in its a pain to get out. It's faster to chant "I divorce thee" three times than to pull the plug on a feed. But we put up with it. Robert Scoble has 840 wives and is happily committed to each and every one of them. Where does he get the energy?

And its going to get worse before it gets better. Behold the coming age of RSS-everywhere: Cory Doctorow points to "A Manifesto for Networked Objects" (PDF) which he breathlessly describes as -

... a paper about the coming wave of "blogjects" -- objects that blog -- which  is to say, manufactured goods that emit a steady stream of information about  their world and what they make of it, and take action to change it. The most peculiar characteristic of Blogjects is that they participate in the exchange of ideas.

Blogjects don’t just publish, they circulate conversations. Not with some sort of artificial intelligence engine or other speculative high-tech wizardry. Blogjects become first-class a-list producers of conversations in the same way that human bloggers do — by starting, maintaining and being critical attractors in conversations around topics that have relevance and meaning to others who have a stake in that discussion.

This wouldn't have made much sense to me before I'd listened to Steve Gillmor's recent conversation with Alex Barnett and Joshua Porter wherein he astutely observed that PageRank is a function of Attention which is in turn a function of feed dissemination. Most bloggers give daily link love to writings they wouldn't even be aware of were it not for RSS. Which is ironic considering feed inundation will kill off Feed Aggregators as we know them today.

To be replaced by what? Adam Green drops hints in his Technorati - Memeorandum mashup which makes wonderful use of the modestly named Optimal Browser. No really, it is modestly named because Optimal is much more than a browser - its a browser of OPML hierarchies and a Feed Reader. The whole of which is much more than the sum of the parts as Adam demonstrates when feeding the software with his mashed up OPML file.

If there's a faster way to find and evaluate new tech blogs than to graze the results of this mashup, I'd love to se it. It combines the blog's rank, number of blogs linking in, and the most recent blog posts linking to the URL into a single OPML outline. That's incredibly convenient.

Of course the fleet footed Feed Aggregators won't die out, they'll just evolve Feed Grazing capabilities. BlogBridge is well on the way with its support for Reading Lists. And imagine a Bloglines - Optimal hybrid where you're only one click away from subscribing to a high quality new blog discovered through a Grazing interface.

Yes, we'll continue to be feed polygamous in future but we'll also be very promiscuous!

Technorati Tags: attention, feed grazers

A podcast about Feed Grazing (and much more)

I've been listening to Alex Barnett's Attention podcasts for months now so I was very flattered to be invited on the latest episode, recorded this weekend. Unfortunately I couldn't make it but I'm still wondering how I managed to be invited on a panel with Adam Green, Danny Ayers and Josh Porter. These guys have so much collective experience and knowledge that its scary to be engaged in any kind of intellectual exchanges with them! Alex publishes details on their backgrounds here and shownotes for the podcast which covered the ideas behind Feed Grazing and Grazing Lists, among other things.

A few quick comments on some of the items that came up -

• Adam considers grazing as a way of getting to individual posts, as opposed to feeds. Agreed. He also thinks of it as being like browsing but with feeds. Spot on!
• Adam says that Grazing Lists and Reading Lists are exactly the same thing but I have a different way of looking at it. While it's true that they are in the technical sense there's an important conceptual difference. It seems that there is a consensus around the idea that a Reading List should be 10 feeds or less so I would define a Reading List as a manually generated low volume, low frequency (of change) list. Whereas a Grazing List is a high volume, high frequency list which is more likely to be generated programmatically, as with Adam's Tech.Memeorandum mashup. But del.icio.us and its ilk will also do this for us.
• Danny is interested in the idea of using feed readers to look at more general data, not just blog posts. Again this is spot on. This is the idea I was trying to make when I wrote that we're all edge cases.

Pito Salas of BlogBridge, the excellent Reading Lists capable feed aggregator, is understandably concerned about us putting the cart before the horse -

"... in the fun and excitement of Semantic Web and OPML name spaces, and dynamic, meta-dynamic, and hyper-dynamic reading lists, it’s easy to lose sight of the universal appeal of sharing ones enthusiasm."

- but I think the two approaches to feed access are absolutely complementary. BlogBridge is an ideal means to producing and Reading Lists while Feed Grazers will more likely be used to consume high volume, high frequency Grazing Lists. Of course an ideal solution would be for BlogBridge to support both models. All it needs to add is hierarchical OPML browsing.

Teach a man to fish - Feeds Vs Attention

Piaras responded to my post about reading lists by suggesting that it would be better to build a del.icio.us feed for articles he pays attention to than to publish an OPML Reading List. While one benefit of a del.icio.us feed is more granularity the problem is that he'd be spoonfeeding us instead of teaching us what to pay attention to.

On the other hand, by sharing an OPML based Reading List Piaras would be providing an "attention lense" which could be applied to many services going forward. Take Kevin Burton's TailRank for instance. It allows me to build my own Memeorandum and import any OPML list I wish. So, if I was to import Piaras' Reading List I could effectively see the world through his eyes! That's what's exciting about Attention data and for the moment it looks like OPML is going to be at least a starting point for Attention applications.

"Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for life." By supplying a del.icio.us bookmark feed you're handing people fish. By sharing your OPML attention data (reading list) you're teaching them how to fish.